How to Chat with YouTube Videos Using AI: Get Instant Insights from Any Video

As YouTube content gets longer and more complex, it’s easy to lose track of the information that matters to you—especially when you’re there to learn. With AI chatbots jumping onto the YouTube scene, you get to interact with long-form YouTube videos in a more engaging and productive way.

This guide details the what, the why, and the how of using an AI chatbot to enhance your YouTube experience. We’ll walk you through a step-by-step process for building your own AI YouTube chatbot from scratch so you can start transforming the way you interact with video content.

Why Chat with a YouTube Video or Channel?

Chatting with a video may sound unusual at first, but it offers several benefits, especially for people looking to learn, research, or explore hours of content in a fast and interactive way. Here’s why using an AI chatbot to interact with videos can be a game-changer.

Save Time and Learn Efficiently

A single video course may be hours long, with only ten minutes covering the topic you’re interested in. An AI chatbot can help pinpoint that information directly with a couple of simple questions. It’s like talking to the creator, clarifying those complex topics that made your head spin. This feature is highly valuable for people with busy schedules, as it enables quick learning without watching the entire video.

Gain Insights from Entire Channels

Many people follow YouTube channels that consistently publish hours of insightful content on specific topics. With an AI chatbot, you can explore these themes across multiple videos, identify trends, and gain a more comprehensive view of the content. This function is especially helpful for students, researchers, or anyone looking to deeply understand a specific subject area.

Engage with Content More Deeply

Traditional learning from YouTube videos requires careful viewing, pausing, and rewinding, which can be time-consuming. So why just watch when you can interact? With an AI chatbot, you can ask questions about specific sections, clarify complex concepts, and even get tailored insights based on the topic.

Benefits of Using an AI Chatbot for YouTube Videos

Better Comprehension

AI chatbots can significantly improve understanding by enabling users to ask follow-up questions, dig into specific parts of a video, or even cover a topic across various videos. They can also enhance the information beyond the video in question. It’s like having a personal tutor available 24/7, helping you grasp content that might have left you scratching your head.

Customizable Learning

One size doesn’t fit all, especially when it comes to learning. With AI-powered YouTube learning, you can tailor your experience to suit your needs. Not all viewers approach videos the same way. Some want detailed analysis, while others are looking for brief takeaways. An AI chatbot can adapt to these varied needs, allowing users to choose topics across all of YouTube, get summaries of YouTube videos, or ask specific questions, making the learning experience flexible and tailored to their preferences.

Great for Research and Note-Taking

If scribbling frantic notes during a video and constantly rewinding isn’t your cup of tea, an AI chatbot will be your new best friend. When conducting research, summarizing content quickly and accurately is essential. AI chatbots can immediately pinpoint key takeaways from long YouTube videos. For example, a student working on a project can use a chatbot to get summaries of several videos in a channel, making it easier to pull together research findings without manually watching each one.

What to ask AI about the videos?

An AI chatbot’s ability to respond intelligently to a wide range of questions allows users to interact with YouTube content in ways that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Here are some examples of the types of questions you can ask:

• “What are the main points of this video?”
  • Ideal for getting a high-level summary without watching every detail. It’s like having a friend sum up the plot after they’ve seen the movie.
• “Summarize the top three videos on this channel about [topic].”
  • Great for identifying recurring themes or gaining a holistic view of a topic.
• “Explain [concept] mentioned at [timestamp].”
  • When the video dives deep into rocket science (literally or figuratively), and you’re left floating in space, just ask the AI to break it down into bite-sized pieces.
• “What’s the conclusion of this video?”
  • A useful way to quickly get the key takeaway if you’re interested in just the final insight or summary.
• “List all steps covered in this tutorial.”
  • Ideal for following practical how-tos or instructions in videos without needing to constantly pause and take notes.

By experimenting with different types of questions, users can make the most of an AI chatbot’s capabilities, creating a dynamic and interactive experience. You can delve into background info, explore differing viewpoints, or even ask for examples to solidify your understanding. It’s interactive video AI at its finest.

Tips for Getting the Best Answers

To get the most out of your AI chatbot when chatting with YouTube videos, here are a few tips:

Use Specific Keywords or Timestamps

Referencing specific keywords, phrases, or timestamps can help the chatbot zero in on the information you’re interested in. For example, if you want details on a section about “artificial intelligence” at the 12-minute mark, mention that timestamp for more targeted responses.

Experiment with Different Question Types

Some questions may yield more detailed or insightful answers than others. Don’t hesitate to try variations or rephrasing to see the responses the AI can generate. For instance, instead of asking for “all points covered,” try “key highlights” or “main points” to see if the AI chatbot presents the information differently.

Use Follow-Up Questions

After getting an initial response, you may want more clarification. With an AI chatbot, you can continue the conversation by asking follow-up questions to dig deeper into topics or refine your understanding of specific points in the video. This flexibility makes the learning experience more interactive and allows for continuous learning.

Who can benefit from chatting with YouTube videos

AI chatbots aren’t just a novelty—they offer real value across various use cases. Here are some practical applications for different types of users:

Students

For students, especially those studying complex subjects like science, math, or history, AI chatbots can quickly summarize lengthy lectures or tutorials, answer questions on difficult topics, and provide a flexible, on-demand learning assistant.

Professionals

For busy professionals looking to stay updated on industry-related channels, AI chatbots can help extract essential points from long webinars or tutorials, saving time and providing valuable insights without needing to watch full videos.

General Knowledge Seekers

If you love learning about diverse topics but don’t have time to watch all your favorite channels, an AI chatbot can summarize or highlight key insights from popular educational videos, making it easier to consume and retain knowledge on various subjects.

Why choose FlowHunt

There are various AI summarizer tools, including YouTube-specific ones, such as ChatTube and SummarizeYou. These simple tools will allow you to enter a YouTube link to get just the summary or chat with a single video. This often happens in a simple interface where you have little to no control over how the information is obtained and processed.

FlowHunt is an AI automation tools builder. Meaning it lets you peek under the hood of any AI tool you want to create and directly adjust it to your needs. Chatting with YouTube is just the tip of the iceberg. You can enhance your learning workflow by adding Wikipedia or ArXiv tool, letting the AI fill in the blanks that didn’t make it to the original video.

Besides a single YouTube video, you also get to chat to your favorite YouTube creators. Well, with the entirety of their content, to be more precise. You can easily link an entire YouTube channel or even search across YouTube to get more information or jump from topic to topic.

Let’s look at the two ways you can use FlowHunt to chat with YouTube videos and channels.

How to Chat with a YouTube Video using FlowHunt

Creating an AI Chatbot for YouTube videos is much less daunting than it seems. Especially in FlowHunt’s no-code drag-and-drop interface. Here’s a step-by-step guide to create your YouTube AI Chatbot:

Don’t feel like building today? Just use our free template from the Flow Library.

1. Create a New Flow: Go to the My Flows screen and create a new flow. Give it a name and a description.
2. Start building by adding the Chat Input and Chat Output components to define the starting point and end point of the Flow.

3. Add a Tool-Calling Agent: For this task, we’ll utilize the tool-calling agent, which is necessary for using the YouTube search tool.

4. Give the Agent tools: Add the URL Retriever tool. The URL retriever allows the Flow to extract the content from the video URL.
5. That’s it! The AI Chatbot is ready to go!

You let the Agent know what to do by writing in its System Message. Feel free to adjust it according to your needs. The system message for this Agent says:

You’re a professional YouTube researcher and a personal assistant.
You are given a YouTube URL. When given the YouTube video URL,
extract the transcript and use it to answer user queries.
Provide concise answers in a friendly tone.
If the answer isn’t in the transcript,
let the user know, and do not try to hallucinate answers.

You can also add other optional features. For example, the Chat History component, which allows the chatbot to remember past conversations. This helps improve responses, especially if you weren’t satisfied with an answer or want to avoid redundancy when going deeper into topics.

Another optional component is the LLM component. While the tool-calling agent already comes prebuilt with GPT-4, this component lets us change the LLM model if needed.

Want to see the Chat with YouTube in action? Try it here!

How to Chat with a YouTube Channel using FlowHunt

Crawling an entire channel requires a different approach. FlowHunt could grab all the videos from the video list, but there are several reasons you wouldn’t want to do that. Flow runs the tools anew whenever you open it. If you were to try and get information from hundreds of videos each time, you would go bankrupt and grow old waiting for your Flow to finish.

Instead, to chat with an entire channel, you will want to crawl it beforehand and keep the data safely in your Knowledge Sources. This way, the Flow only needs to search the information already in its database. What’s more, whenever you crawl the channel again, it only crawls what’s new instead of doing the whole channel again.

Here’s how you can crawl a YouTube channel and save it to your Knowledge Sources:

• Go to Knowledge Sources → Schedules
• Create a new schedule. Pick the YouTube Channel type and set the frequency:

• Wait for the schedule to finish.

Now you can make your Flow use the schedule:

1. Create a New Flow: Go to the My Flows screen and create a new flow. Give it a name and a description.
2. Start building by adding the Chat Input and Chat Output components to define the starting point and end point of the Flow.

3. Add a Tool-Calling Agent: For this task, we’ll utilize the tool-calling agent, which is necessary for using the YouTube search tool.
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