Last week YouTube announced it’s testing a new automatic video chapters feature and an easier way for users to add timestamps to their videos.
In May, YouTube announced the rollout of video chapters, which lets them timestamp sections of their videos for viewers to navigate. It has now announced the test of two new features – automatic video chapters and an easier way to add timestamps to videos.
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Automatic Video Chapters
In an announcement last week, YouTube explained: “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).”
Automatic video chapters will use machine learning to recognize text and generate video chapters automatically. The feature is available to a small group of videos for the time being. If you realize that your videos are affected – and don’t want to be part of the test – you can opt-out or share feedback. You can find out more about adding chapters to your videos using timestamps in the following video.
Easier Timestamps
YouTube is also testing an easier way to add timestamps to videos. As explained in the announcement: “We’re testing out an easier way to add a video timestamp tied to the exact moment you’re watching when commenting on a video.”
If you’re in this experiment, you will see a new icon when writing a comment that you can tap and automatically add the video’s current time without having to enter it manually). Only a few users are currently testing this feature.