Google’s rapid adoption of AI has seen the Gemini “sparkle” icon become an omnipresent element in almost every Google product.
Gemini is also integrated with Google Drive, where it’s gaining a new feature that could make it genuinely useful: Google’s AI bot will soon be able to watch videos stored in your Drive so you don’t have to.
Google says the next step is plugging videos into Gemini, saving you from wasting time scrubbing through a file just to find something of interest.
This feature will be accessible only from the Gemini overlay in Drive or in the standalone Drive file viewer.
It could take up to 15 days for all eligible accounts to get Gemini video support.
Since Google’s quick adoption of AI, the Gemini “sparkle” icon has appeared in practically every Google product. If you trust it to do so, it can summarize your emails, add items to your calendar, and more. Google’s AI bot will soon be able to watch videos saved in your Drive so you don’t have to, which is another feature that Gemini has integrated with Google Drive and could make it truly helpful.
With its capacity to compile and analyze data, summarize documents or folders, and elaborate on the subjects discussed in your documents, Gemini is already available in Drive. According to Google, the next step is to plug videos into Gemini, which will save you time searching through files for something interesting.
Skimming an email or brief document is easy, so it doesn’t always make sense to use a chatbot to analyze and manipulate text. Using a chatbot can take longer and may not yield any insightful information. Videos are unique in that they are linear in nature, presenting information at the pace determined by the video creator. Although it’s more laborious than reading something at your own pace, you can rewind or alter the playback speed to catch anything you missed. Gemini’s ability to support video in Drive could therefore save you time.
Let’s say you have a video recording of your meeting that you have saved to Drive. To take notes or review a specific exchange, you could watch it again. Alternatively, as Google advises, you can ask Gemini to highlight the key points of the video. Given that AI output is typically more accurate when grounded in a particular data set or file, this could be a fantastic substitute. Of course, you should continue to be moderately skeptical of what the AI tells you about your video’s content.
Only the Gemini overlay in Drive or the standalone Drive file viewer will provide access to this feature. This feature, crucially, depends on Google’s automatically generated video captions. Every video that is uploaded to your Drive has this feature enabled by default. The administrator may have turned off automatic captioning or set it to on-demand if you use a managed Workspace account. Using the Manage Caption Tracks setting to create captions may be necessary if Gemini is unable to comprehend your videos.
This feature, like the majority of Workspace features, is exclusive to paid accounts and won’t be available to everyone at once. In addition to individual Google One AI Premium accounts, users in business, enterprise, and education all have access (subject to administrator approval). Although Google didn’t specifically mention AI Ultra subscriptions, we anticipate that this exorbitantly costly option will be included. All eligible accounts may not receive Gemini video support for up to 15 days.
