Check a YouTube talk before you watch it

Send a YouTube link in a Bearly chat and the reply opens the video in a card: the player, a verdict on whether it's worth your time, key moments on a timeline, and shorter cuts of the essential parts. Tabs hold the summary, takeaways, what the video names, what commenters add, and the transcript when Bearly has one. With a transcript, Check claims looks up the figures the video states and counts the sites that give the same figure or a different one.

A 50-minute talk

Say a colleague sends you a conference talk on the economics of electric vehicles. It runs 50 minutes, cites two books and a paper, and puts a number on almost everything.

Paste the link. The card opens with a verdict (Watch, Skim or Skip) and a one-line reason, plus a title check when the title promises more than the talk delivers. Under the player, the key moments sit on a timeline, drawn over YouTube's most-replayed curve when the video has one. Click a moment to jump there. Choose 5 min and the player runs the essential stretches back to back. A length appears only when the video is long enough for it.

Summary has the chapters, each time a link into the player. Insights lists the takeaways. When Bearly can read the captions, each takeaway comes with a quote, checked against the transcript word for word; a takeaway whose quote isn't there is dropped. Community sums up the top comments: what people agree on, push back on and correct, and the tips they add. Transcript is searchable. On a how-to video, Steps lists the steps and any commands, ready to copy.

Then ask. When there's a transcript, "What did she say about battery prices?" reads it; otherwise Bearly answers from the summary. "Show me just the part about charging" gives you a cut of that section.

The books and papers it names

Mentioned lists the papers, books, code repositories and tools the talk names, each with the second it came up and, when Bearly read the captions, the sentence it came up in.

Find looks one up. It shows a result only when the result names the work word for word as the talk said it, and, if the speaker gave an author, the author's name has to appear too. Otherwise it says No match found rather than offering a guess. It doesn't decide which site is official, so a tool can turn up on a third-party listing, and a book with several editions can open a different edition. Find's answers last until you reload the chat.

When the captions can't be read

For most videos, Bearly can't read the captions. Then it watches the video instead. The summary, takeaways and Mentioned list come from watching: the card says times are approximate and names may be misheard, and takeaways have no quotes. A video longer than 90 minutes is summarized from its first 90 minutes.

A card made this way has no transcript, so follow-up questions are answered from the summary, and there is no Check claims. In an up-to-date desktop app, the Transcript tab of such a card offers Get transcript, which reads the captions over your own connection and saves them to the chat's files. The transcript and Check claims then appear on the card, on the web too. The summary and takeaways stay as they were written from watching.

Checking the figures

Check claims needs a transcript, so for most videos that means pressing Get transcript in the desktop app first. Pressing Check claims, at the top of Insights, opens a Claims tab. It lists up to 40 figures the talk states, such as statistics, amounts, counts and dates, each pinned to the second it's said. One press checks 12, and Check N more under the list checks the next 12. For each figure, Bearly searches the web and counts the sites whose pages give the same figure or a different one.

The labels are counts: Matched by 3 sites, Found on 1 site, Split · 2 match, 1 differs, Not found in 5 results. Bearly doesn't say whether a figure is true, and not found doesn't mean wrong. A site with a different figure may be newer or counting something else, so open the row: it shows the sentence from the talk and each source's words, with links. When the video has only automatic captions, the check says so, because they can mishear numbers.

The check is saved to the chat, so it's there after a reload and on your other devices. You can ask Bearly about it. Checking uses plan allowance, and the button says so.

Where it works

The card works on every plan, in the web app and the desktop app. Typing /youtube asks for the card in that message. Some uploaders don't allow playback outside YouTube; Open on YouTube is always on the card.

Copy on the reply copies the card as text, with each time linked to that second on YouTube. The Claims tab has its own Copy for the check.

Reading a video uses your plan's usage, as any reply does, and so do the web searches behind Find and Check claims. When your plan's allowance is used up, Find and Check claims turn off, and Bearly can't summarize a new video whose captions it couldn't read.

Team admins can turn the feature off with the YouTube policy, and it's off whenever Web is. Check claims and Find also need Chat web search; with it off, Find can still look up papers when Scholar is on.