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YouTube begins testing auto video chapters to help save you valuable editing time

YouTube’s experiments are regularly testbeds for core features that will eventually come to the video-sharing platform wholesale. Chapters have been a big component for creators for a little while now but needed manual inclusion within a video description. Now time may be saved as YouTube is testing auto-generated video chapters for selected videos.

Video chapters began rolling out earlier this year for mobile devices, but the latest YouTube experiment will see automatic chapters be added to videos — so that you don’t have to manually add them to your video description. As someone that spends a ton of time on YouTube, I can see being a godsend for many people uploading to the platform.

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.

That said, we can foresee some issues with these AI-powered chapters. But we’re sure that this feature is being added as it would pair well with the auto “points of interest” chapters that some YouTube videos now show within Google Search. You’ll know if a video includes auto-generated chapters, as no timestamps will be found within the video description.

We have yet to see any YouTube videos with automatically generated chapters, so be sure to let us know how it all looks and how accurate they appear to be down in the comments section below if you do spot them in action. If for whatever reason you want to opt-out of this experiment if your videos are impacted, you can opt-out directly via this link.

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Avatar for Damien Wilde Damien Wilde

Damien is a UK-based video producer for 9to5Google. Find him on Twitter: @iamdamienwilde. Email: damien@9to5mac.com


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