The YouTube chapters feature is one of the most useful functionalities that the social network has ever added. Normally, people would have to add custom timestamps in the comments below particularly lengthy videos but YouTube made things easier with chapters. The problem is that content creators have to manually add those to their videos and when a channel has hundreds of videos under its belt it’s not an easy task. Now YouTube has announced that it has begun testing a new AI machine learning algorithm that will try to add timestamps to videos automatically. Information about the test can be found on YouTube’s experiments official page.
[November 23 2020] Testing automatic video chapters: We want to make it easier for people to navigate videos with video chapters, so we are experimenting with automatically adding video chapters (so creators don’t have to manually add timestamps). We’ll use machine learning to recognize text in order to auto-generate video chapters. We’re testing this out with a small group of videos. If your videos are impacted, you can opt-out of this experiment and/or share feedback.
It’s not clear how effectively this new AI will tackle the task. If the experiment proves to be successful, the new feature might help YouTube viewers quickly and easily navigate through content.
