How video understanding works
A video understanding system usually combines several models:
- Shot detection splits the video where the camera cuts.
- Speech recognition makes a transcript with timestamps and speakers.
- OCR reads text on screen.
- Vision models describe objects, people, and actions in sampled frames.
- A language model joins these signals into scenes, chapters, and a summary.
Why it matters
Video is the largest type of data on the internet, but software cannot read it directly. Video understanding makes video searchable, editable, and usable by AI agents.
Video Context provides video understanding as an API. See the Video Understanding API.