Not all YouTube videos are compatible with Microsoft Edge Copilot AI’s video summary feature

Microsoft is working hard to keep pace in the AI race by enhancing its Copilot tools. Recently, an update was rolled out for Microsoft Edge Copilot AI, introducing a valuable feature that enables the generation of text summaries for videos. Additionally, users can now ask the Copilot questions related to the video content. This functionality resembles the one introduced by Google Bard a few months ago through its YouTube extension. However, similar to Google Bard, Microsoft Edge Copilot has limitations and can only summarize videos under specific circumstances.

Clarification of its limitations comes from Microsoft’s CEO of advertising and online services, Mikhail Parakhin, in an X-message. He said: “For it to work, we need to pre-process the video. If the video has subtitles – we can always go back to it, if it doesn’t and we haven’t pre-processed it yet – then it won’t work”.

Microsoft Edge Copilot AI does not summarize all videos

First reported by MSPowerUser, the article explains that Copilot’s transcription functionality relies on video pre-processing or the availability of subtitles. The latter is easy to understand, but the pre-processing here simply means that Microsoft has to transcribe the video beforehand for the AI tool to work.

This is similar to the transcription feature in MS Teams, where Microsoft has access to the audio and video files and processes them using a different software technology. If Microsoft Edge Copilot tries to summarize a video, if Microsoft has extracted it for preprocessing, the AI tool can access the data through the cloud and provide a summary, but otherwise it can’t.

This severely limits the functionality of the tool because most videos on the internet, be it YouTube videos, Vimeo or any other platform, do not have subtitles. In addition to this, it is impossible for Microsoft to pre-process all videos on the Internet. Some reports suggest that YouTube alone has at least 800 million active videos on the platform.

So while users can summarize and ask questions about videos from visible channels that strictly add subtitles to videos, there’s a good chance that the Microsoft Edge Copilot tool simply won’t work.