The story of YouTube’s video chapters has been, at least by December 2020, a story of unfulfilled promises.

Especially for long videos, and for categories such as tutorials, concerts, and mixes, video chapters are an extremely useful tool to locate specific segments, like instructions or songs. If creators used them more often, that is!

Though this does not seem to be the platform’s fault (for once), YouTube is testing the ability to flex its machine learning prowess to automate the creation of these chapters. The platform explains that:

“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)”

We are excited!

Learn more here.