Google is making it easier for YouTube creators to engage with their audience and quickly respond to comments underneath their videos.
The company is rolling out Smart Reply, an AI-powered feature designed to help users generate appropriate responses without actually writing, to YouTube Studio. This is what the implementation looks like:
Unlike Smart Reply for Gmail, YouTube integration supports multiple languages. At the moment, Smart Reply for creators only works in English and Spanish, but it seems that Google plans to add more options in the future.
In a blog post, Google researchers explained that they had to come up with a whole new language processing model to accommodate common emoji usage on YouTube. As a result, the function will also suggest responses containing emoji.
“Compared to emails, which tend to be long and dominated by formal language, YouTube comments reveal complex patterns of language switching, abbreviated words, jargon, inconsistent use of punctuation, and heavy use of emoji, “he says. blog post.
The researchers add that Smart Reply has been tweaked to only work for comments that Google believes creators are likely to have. That could also explain why 9to5Google reports that the feature only seems to work for some comments.
“Our goal is to help creators, so we must make sure that SmartReply only makes suggestions when it is very useful, ”the blog post reads. “Ideally, suggestions will only show up when the creator is likely to respond to the comment and when the model has a high probability of providing a sensible and specific response.”
My colleague Abhimanyu Ghoshal has been a vocal advocate for Smart Reply, which helped him stop ignoring emails. However, in the case of YouTube, the tool will make it much easier for creators to interact with their community without spending a lifetime writing each response personally.
In other news, Google is also experimenting with the extension of its Smart Compose feature, which helps Gboard users complete their sentences without writing, to messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp. So in case you were eager to outsource the tedious task of conversing with people with robots, you absolutely can (and maybe should).
Posted on July 2, 2020 – 11:06 UTC
