YouTube tests AI to skip the boring stuff
Many YouTube videos are annoying with blah blah blah, which users like to skip. In the USA, an AI function called Jump Ahead is now helping.
(Bild: Shutterstock.com/Chubo - my masterpiece)
Artificial intelligence (AI) should help YouTube users to skip to the interesting sequences in videos. All too often, films are annoying with logorrhea, which not only puts viewers off, but also creates unnecessary load on YouTube's servers. The company's own search engine Google has therefore been linking directly to "important sequences" in selected YouTube videos for years. Now, a similar function called Jump Ahead is being introduced in the YouTube app for Android users in the USA.
Jump Ahead is still an experimental feature and must be activated via youtube.com/new. If the user then makes a double tap – usually an instruction to fast-forward by ten seconds – the Jump Ahead option can also appear. According to information from March, Jump Ahead combines data on previously observed viewer behavior with AI algorithms. The AI tries to guess which part of the YouTube video the user actually wants to advance to.
Only for US premium subscriptions
Jump Ahead is only available to US users who pay for a YouTube Premium subscription, and even then, only in the YouTube app for Android for certain English-language videos. Since the end of March, the data company has made the feature available to a small group of selected users on a trial basis, and is now starting a larger test with those who register at youtube.com/new.
In this way, YouTube sometimes tries out things that later become a general offer or disappear again. While Jump Ahead was available for self-uploaded videos without a Premium subscription in the March test, heise online has not yet been able to activate the test function with a US account without a Premium subscription.
Last year, the streaming platform introduced new AI tools for video production, YouTube Create and Dream Screen, which make it easier to create videos. Dream Screen can generate backgrounds for shorts, the short videos on YouTube, from a text template. Dream Track is an experiment in which a generative AI creates music. Over the course of this year, YouTube intends to further support its video producers with additional AI features.
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