ChatGPT's Chrome extension gets YouTube video and tab reading support

OpenAI is making its Chrome extension more useful for people who want ChatGPT to work with the web pages they already have open. The latest update adds support for YouTube videos, open tabs, and highlighted text.

This comes after OpenAI changed its browser plans and decided to sunset Atlas in favor of the ChatGPT desktop app and its Chrome extension. The company now appears to be putting more of its browser features inside products people already use, including Chrome.

The new tools are available through Side Chat, where users can ask questions while browsing. OpenAI says people can “ask about a YouTube video, reference your open tabs, or highlight text on a page and ask away.”

That could be handy when a webpage contains more information than someone wants to read line by line. Users could highlight a confusing section and ask ChatGPT to explain it in simpler language. They could also compare details from different tabs without manually copying everything into the chat.

OpenAI has been testing this kind of browser integration for a while. It previously asked Atlas users to help shape future browser features in the ChatGPT app. Bringing similar tools to a Chrome extension could give the company a much larger audience without requiring users to switch browsers.

That said, I gave the ChatGPT extension on Chrome a task to summarize a YouTube video and was pretty underwhelmed. It took over a minute to give me a decent summary of the video. In comparison, Chrome’s built-in Ask Gemini feature gave me the summary almost twice as fast and with more detail too.

Add to that, simply asking it to summarize the video took up 2 percent of my usage limits for ChatGPT on the Go plan.

For someone who only wants a quick summary once in a while, the delay may not matter much. But using up 2 percent of a monthly limit for one basic request could quickly become annoying.

OpenAI seems to be trying to bring some of Atlas’s ideas to a wider audience through Chrome, but the experience needs to be fast enough to compete with tools already built into the browser.

For now, ChatGPT’s extension is useful if you want to ask questions about a page or highlighted text. When it comes to YouTube summaries, though, Google’s Ask Gemini feature was faster and gave me a more detailed result in my test.

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