What is Video Intelligence?
Video Intelligence is an AI-powered feature in Pics.io that helps you understand, organize, and search video content without watching it manually. It analyzes a video file and automatically extracts useful information such as summaries, keywords, chapters, spoken text, and key moments.
Instead of treating video as a “black box,” Video Intelligence turns it into structured, searchable content - similar to how Pics.io already works with images and documents.
How Video Intelligence works
When you run Video Intelligence on a video asset, Pics.io sends the file for analysis to an external AI service. The AI watches and listens to the video, then returns a structured set of insights: what the video is about, how it is organized, what is said, what appears on screen, and which important entities are mentioned.
Pics.io automatically maps these results into familiar fields in the asset’s Details panel - such as Description and Keywords - and into a dedicated Video Intelligence tab for deeper exploration. You don’t need to configure anything or understand how the AI works behind the scenes: you simply run the analysis and use the results like any other metadata in Pics.io.
What metadata does Video Intelligence generate?
Video Intelligence extracts several complementary types of metadata from each video. Together, they help you quickly understand what the video is about, navigate long recordings, and search for very specific moments inside your library.
AI Video Summary
The AI Video Summary is a concise, AI-generated description of the entire video, typically one to two paragraphs long. It captures the main topic, context, and storyline, giving you an immediate understanding of the content without watching the video from start to finish. Think of it as a short synopsis, similar to a movie or book description. The summary is saved to the existing Description field of the asset, where you can edit it manually or expand it for full reading if the text is long.
Keywords
Keywords describe the video as a whole, without being tied to specific moments in time. They reflect the main themes and categories of the content and are designed to improve discovery across your entire library. For example, tags such as Marketing, SaaS, or Product Analytics make it easy to filter and find related videos in seconds. These tags are saved to the standard Keywords field of the asset and work exactly like regular keywords in Pics.io - you can review them, edit them, or add your own at any time.
Chapters
Chapters automatically split a video into large, meaningful sections, such as an introduction, a product demo, or a Q&A segment. This creates a clear structure for long-form content like presentations, lectures, or recorded meetings. Chapters help you quickly understand how a video is organized and move directly to the section you need instead of scrubbing through the entire timeline.
In the asset’s Details panel, chapters appear as a compact preview to indicate that the video is structured. The full chapter list, including exact timestamps and search, is available in the Video Intelligence tab, and chapters are also visually marked on the video timeline during preview, similar to how chapters work on YouTube.
Actions
Actions (also referred to as Events) capture specific moments inside a video, focusing on concrete actions rather than broad sections. While chapters describe what the video is generally about, events describe what exactly happens at a given moment, for example, when a speaker draws a diagram, demonstrates a feature, or clicks a specific button. This makes it possible to search not just for videos, but for precise moments within them.
In the Details panel, you’ll see a short preview of detected events to give you a sense of the video’s level of detail. The complete list, with timestamps and search, lives in the Video Intelligence tab.
Recognized Text (Key Headings / OCR)
Recognized Text is generated using AI-powered OCR applied to the video frames and is carefully filtered to include only meaningful on-screen text, such as slide titles, headings, or prominent captions. Smaller, repetitive, or purely decorative text is ignored to avoid clutter. This makes it possible to search videos based on what appears visually on screen, which is especially useful for presentations, webinars, and training materials. A short preview of recognized text is shown in the Details panel, while the full list with timestamps is available in the Video Intelligence tab.
Transcript
The Transcript converts all spoken audio in a video into text, complete with timestamps and automatic speaker separation. It allows you to search through spoken content as easily as written documents, copy exact quotes, or reuse key parts of a discussion. In the Details panel, only a short excerpt of the transcript is displayed to keep the interface clean. The full transcript, including speaker labels and precise timing, is available in the Video Intelligence tab.
Who is Video Intelligence for?
Video Intelligence is designed for teams that work with large amounts of video and need a faster, more reliable way to understand and reuse it. Instead of relying on filenames, memory, or manual tagging, these teams can search and navigate video content by what actually happens inside it.
For media and broadcasting teams, Video Intelligence turns large video archives into searchable libraries. Editors, archivists, and producers can quickly find interviews, quotes, or specific scenes and jump straight to the relevant moment, instead of spending hours reviewing raw footage.
For marketing teams and creative agencies, the feature makes it easier to reuse campaign materials and creative assets. Teams can search videos by product mentions, slogans, or on-screen text, and quickly assemble highlight reels or case studies from existing footage rather than reshooting or manually reviewing dozens of videos.
For education and training organizations, Video Intelligence helps unlock the value of recorded knowledge. Lectures, webinars, and training sessions become searchable by topic, terminology, or spoken explanation, making it easier for learners and employees to find exactly what they need and reuse content across courses or programs.
For corporate teams and internal communications, recorded meetings, presentations, and all-hands sessions become a searchable internal knowledge base. Employees can find discussions such as budget reviews or feature demos simply by searching for them, without rewatching entire recordings.
Finally, content platforms and marketplaces benefit from automatic tagging and indexing of user-uploaded videos. Video Intelligence enables content-based search for end users and, in future iterations, can expose structured metadata via API for deeper integration into custom platforms.
Supported formats
Please see the list below for video formats and codecs that Video Intelligence supports:
video/x-flv
video/quicktime
video/mpeg
video/mpegps
video/mpg
video/mp4
video/webm
video/wmv
video/3gpp
video/x-matroska
video/x-msvideo
video/x-ms-wmv
video/x-m4v
video/ogg
video/avi
model/vnd.mts
video/x-ms-asf
application/mxf
video/mp2t
audio/aac
audio/flac
audio/mp3
audio/m4a
audio/mpeg
audio/mpga
audio/mp4
audio/opus
audio/pcm
audio/wav
audio/webm
Availability and pricing
Video Intelligence is available as part of the AI Kit add-on. Video analysis is billed based on AI minutes, similar to how transcription is measured today. Each time you run analysis on a video, the system deducts minutes based on the video’s duration, and your usage and remaining balance are visible in the Billing section.
NB! A few important things to keep in mind:
Video Intelligence is currently available in the web app only (v1).
AI-generated video metadata is not shown on public sharing portals or external collection pages.
Trial accounts receive a limited number of free AI minutes to explore the feature before upgrading.
Summary
As video becomes a primary content format, simply storing files is no longer enough. Video Intelligence helps Pics.io move beyond traditional DAM capabilities by making video content as searchable and usable as images or text documents. It reduces time spent on manual review and tagging, increases reuse of existing video assets, and lays the foundation for future AI-powered workflows such as advanced semantic search, summaries, and localization.
In short, Video Intelligence ensures that growing video libraries remain accessible, valuable, and easy to work with - instead of becoming unmanageable over time.
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