Future of YouTube Comments Powered By Artificial Intelligence

Google introduces its SmartReply feature for YouTube creators. This technology with the help of artificial intelligence analyses the message from the user and predicts the response for it.

Initially, this A.I. based technology was used in Gmail, android messages and to other android devices to suggest messages and replies.

This feature is now implemented in YouTube studio. From YouTube Studio’s comments section, creators can filter, view and respond to comments from across their channels. Currently, SmartReply for YouTube is only available for English and Spanish language creators.

(Image source: Google)

As YouTube developers receive enormous volume of responses to their videos from viewers, SmartReply will save a great amount of time and efforts in replying to each comment manually and allowing them to be in touch with the viewers more easily. However, the YouTube replies will be still chosen by the creator from the suggestions provided by the software. This technology will not post anything by itself but will only provide suggestions.

According to Google,” In comparison to emails, which tend to be long and dominated by formal language, YouTube comments reveal complex patterns of language switching, abbreviated words, slang, inconsistent usage of punctuation, and heavy utilization of emoji.” This was the difficulty faced by Google while implementing the SmartReply feature on YouTube.

(Image source: Google)

Initially, SmartReply encoded word-by-word with a neural network, and then decoded prospective replies with another neural network. But this method was computationally expensive, so in place of this approach, a system was developed where it searches through a predefined list of suggestions for the most perfect replies. This system worked well for Gmail and other SmartReply systems but it faced challenges for YouTube (because of its content like slang, abbreviated words, emoji, ASCII, typos, etc.), to accomplish this Google applied a deep transform network which is able to model words and phrases from the sequence of characters or bytes and making SmartReply’s first cross-lingual and character byte-based version of the technology.

Ideally, they want that the software to provide suggestions only when the creator would reply to the comment and when the model has a high chance of providing a sensible and specific response or it is very likely to be useful to the viewer’s comment.

Bibliography:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/07/smartreply-for-youtube-creators.html

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/google-brings-its-ai-powered-smartreply-feature-to-youtube/