Ask — through YouTube's own Ask
Ask the video a question and get a few timestamped lines back. It runs on YouTube's own Ask, so it costs nothing and needs no AI key.
Ask the video a question and get a few timestamped lines back instead of an essay. It runs on YouTube’s own Ask — Google’s model, already holding the whole video — so it costs you nothing, needs no AI key, and counts against no allowance. The video pauses when the answer lands, and you can keep any of it as notes.
Using it
On a YouTube watch page, open the Study chip on the video that’s playing and pick Ask. It’s on by default and needs no account.
Type a question and press Enter. We open YouTube’s own Ask panel and put your question in it, wearing a short format instruction — see below.
When YouTube answers, the video pauses and its panel is scrolled into view and briefly outlined. Read the answer there.
Back in our panel, tick anything worth keeping and press Save. It becomes a note on this video, filed at the moment the answer names.
We shape the question, not the answer
Left to itself, YouTube’s Ask writes a paragraph of preamble, an answer, and a paragraph of summary. That is the one thing you can’t use mid-video — it takes longer to read than to rewind. So every question we hand over carries the same short contract: one line per claim, each led by the moment it came from, three to five of them, earliest first, no preamble.
Your question goes first. It lands in YouTube’s chat as your own message and stays there, so a wall of instructions above it would make your own history unreadable a week later.
We send no context with it. No title, no transcript, no excerpts — YouTube’s Ask already has the video. Sending it anyway would be paying twice for something the other side already knows.
“This video doesn’t cover that” is a real answer, and we ask for it by name so it comes back as a plain line rather than a paragraph of hedging.
The timestamps become buttons. Each line in our panel seeks the player, so a claim is one click from being checked.
Where it doesn’t work
YouTube decides which videos and which accounts get its Ask, and on a video where it hasn’t put one, this tool does nothing and says so. There is no fallback, no retry and no “use our AI instead” button.
That’s deliberate. Ask used to run on your own AI key, and it was the one tool here whose cost had no ceiling — a fresh call every single time, shareable with nobody. Keeping that as a fallback would have kept every problem it had (the key, the cap, the bill) and added a second answer format on top. Everything else in the extension still works on those videos, and notes and transcripts need no AI at all.
What it costs
| Signed out | Signed in | With your own AI key | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asking a question | Free | Free | Free |
| Requests to our servers | None | None | None |
| Counts against a limit | No | No | No |
| Account | Not needed | Not needed | Not needed |
Answers from before this changed
Ask used to generate its own answers, and if you asked any, they’re still yours. They stay on your machine, still sync between your browsers, are still in Study → Settings → Download all my study data, and both panels show them underneath — read-only, with Copy and Delete. Nothing new is added to that list.
Questions
Is this a chatbot?
Ours isn’t. We hand one question over and then get out of the way — the conversation, if you want one, is YouTube’s, in YouTube’s panel, with their follow-up box. We don’t mirror it: a second place to read the same words, two inches from the first, is exactly the kind of thing this extension exists to remove.
Why does the video pause?
Because you stopped following it the moment you had a question. Without the pause you come back from the answer thirty seconds downstream of where you left, having missed the part you were about to understand. It only pauses if it was still playing.
Ask isn't showing on this video.
Then YouTube isn’t offering its Ask there. It’s a limited feature on their side — some accounts, some videos, some countries — and it changes without notice. Nothing is wrong with your setup, and there’s nothing to switch on.
Can I still get answers that quote the captions?
Not from Ask. That was what the old key-powered version did, and its citations were verified against the transcript before you saw them — a real thing to lose, and worth naming. What replaces it is free: YouTube’s answer gives timestamps you can click and check yourself, against the transcript, which is free and unlimited.
Do my questions get sent to CoursifyYT?
No. They go into YouTube’s own Ask box on the page you’re on. We never see the question or the answer unless you save part of it as a note, and a note is stored on your machine.