This week, AICopilot in Microsoft Edge browser added a feature that generates video text summaries. But as Mikhail Parakhin, CEO of Microsoft Advertising and Network Services, explained, EdgeCopilot's time-saving features are still quite limited and only work with pre-processed videos or videos with subtitles.
"In order for this to work, we need to preprocess the video. If the video has subtitles, we can always restore it; if there are no subtitles and we haven't preprocessed it, then it won't work," Parakhin wrote.
In other words, EdgeCopilot itself is not so much a summary video as it is a transcript summarizing the video. Copilot can also perform similar functions across Microsoft 365, including summarizing Teams video meetings and customer service agent calls - in both cases, the audio needs to be transcribed by Microsoft first. Copilot on Microsoft Stream can also summarize any video, but again requires the user to generate a written transcript.
The conversation started after designer Pietro Schirano posted a screen recording of EdgeCopilot summarizing the YouTube video of the GTAVI trailer. In this case, Copilot seems to have done the job perfectly. The user in the recording presses the "Generate Video Summary" button on Copilot's sidebar, and just a few seconds later, Copilot generates a video summary with key points and timestamps.
Of course, many platforms, including YouTube and Vimeo, can automatically generate transcripts and subtitles if the user has enabled this feature. TheVerge asked Parakhin on
Copilot is just the latest example of Microsoft taking on Google (and others) in a race to generate generative AI. Last month, Google upgraded its Bard chatbot with a YouTube extension that enables it to summarize video content and surface specific information from it. Just this week, Google announced a major update to Gemini, but the update itself has its problems -- in one presentation, the company's editors may have misrepresented some of the AI's capabilities, and Google doesn't always get the facts straight.
Parashin spoke candidly on social media about Copilot's various stages of development.