Search & Retrieval
Best AI Video Search Tools in 2026: Knowledge Bases That Answer Questions About Your Media
If you are looking for an AI that can watch videos and answer questions about them, this is that category: an AI video search engine that ingests your recordings and returns the right file, the right moment, and an answer in words.
A searchable media knowledge base is a library you can question: "who is the project manager?", "when did they discuss the selling price?", and get the right file, the right moment, and ideally the answer itself. Every tool here does some of that. They differ on whether they return moments or whole files, whether they answer in words, what they can ingest, and whether you drive them from an API or a web page.
Echosaw is an entry in this list. We wrote the question set and the harness, ran them, and publish every response below. The ranking follows the rubric, not the byline.
The measured part of this list uses one 10-minute meeting video and 14 questions. That is enough to expose real differences in moment retrieval and question answering; it is not a benchmark of scale, multilingual content, or document-heavy libraries, and results on your own material will differ.
- Tested
- September 10, 2026
- Last updated
- September 11, 2026
- Tested by
- Devin (AI engineer, Echosaw)
- Reviewed by
- Matthew Simpson
Disclosure: Echosaw is our product and appears in this list. It is scored on the same rubric and dataset as every other entry.
Quick answer
- 1
Best for teams that want video, audio, and documents analysed into one library with transcripts, summaries, and moment search behind one API key.
- 2Twelve LabsMeasured
Best for developers building video search and video Q&A into their own product.
- 3NotebookLM (Gemini Notebook)Doc-verified
Best for individuals and small teams who want to question a fixed set of sources and get cited answers, for free.
- 4MixpeekDoc-verified
Best for engineering teams that want a managed extraction-and-retrieval layer over their own object storage, or a vector database for embeddings they already have.
- 5FirefliesDoc-verified
Best for teams whose library is their own meetings, recorded by a bot on Zoom, Meet, or Teams.
Measured results
2 of 5 entries were run on the same input. Entries marked doc-verified were not run and are excluded from this table.
| Tool | Version tested | Item@1 | Moment hit@1 | Moment hit@3 | Answers correct | Search latency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EchosawOur product | Echosaw gamma 2026-09-11, GET /v1/media/search?scope=mine (media-level + 60 s transcript-window vectors) and POST /v1/media/ask over a 17-item library | 14 / 1417-item library | 13 / 14one moment per item | 13 / 14no ranked clips | 12 / 14pattern-matched, library-wide ask | 2.55 sanswers 8.3 s mean |
| Twelve Labs | marengo3.0 search (visual+audio) + pegasus1.5 analyze, twelvelabs SDK 1.3.4; index of 1 video | 14 / 14single-item index | 4 / 14 | 7 / 14 | 10 / 14pattern-matched, one sentence each | 0.27 sanswers 32 s mean |
How we evaluated
The library item is the first 600 seconds of AMI meeting ES2002a (corner camera, 640x480 upscale), the same file as the video transcript & summary list, already ingested by each measured service during that test. Fourteen natural-language questions about the meeting were written from the AMI word-level annotations, each with a gold time span (the seconds in which the answer is spoken) and an answer pattern (queries.json). Questions cover names and roles, the brief, the whiteboard icebreaker, and the finance discussion.
Item@1 is the number of questions for which the meeting video ranked first among everything in the account. For Echosaw the account library held 17 items (test videos, audio, images, and documents from our own QA); for Twelve Labs the index held only the test video, so Item@1 is trivially 14/14 and is not used to separate the two. Moment hit@1 (and @3) is the number of questions whose first (or any of the first three) returned moment falls in the gold span widened by 15 seconds either side, counted only when the meeting video also ranked first; Echosaw returns one best moment per item, Twelve Labs returns ranked clips whose midpoint is used. Answers correct is the number of answers matching the pattern: Twelve Labs via Pegasus analyze on the video, Echosaw via POST /v1/media/ask with the question alone (no media id), so its answer also has to find the right item in the 17-item library.
Latency is mean wall-clock seconds per search call from a US-east client. Pricing is the list price on each vendor's public pricing page on the test date. Mixpeek has no free tier ($25/month minimum), NotebookLM requires a Google account, and Fireflies sign-in requires a Google or Microsoft account; none were run and all three are marked documentation-verified with no figures in the results table.
Dataset
AMI ES2002a, first 600 s + 14 questions — Kick-off meeting of a four-person design team. Question set with gold time spans and answer patterns is published in the harness as queries.json. License: AMI Meeting Corpus CC BY 4.0; question set CC BY 4.0.
Harness and raw output: /curated-lists/harness/kb/
Ranking rubric
- Retrieval accuracy35%
- Right item and right moment for natural-language questions over the library.
- Answer quality25%
- Whether the tool answers the question in words, and whether the answer is correct.
- Ingestion breadth and access20%
- Media types accepted, library size limits, and whether ingestion and query are available by API.
- Price20%
- Cost to ingest and query a small library on the cheapest plan that supports the workflow.
The rankings
Orange Sky Software · Best for teams that want video, audio, and documents analysed into one library with transcripts, summaries, and moment search behind one API key
Best measured retrieval: the right item first for 14 of 14 questions in a 17-item mixed library and the spoken moment inside the gold span for 13 of 14, 12 of 14 questions answered correctly by POST /v1/media/ask, and the widest ingestion (video, audio, images, documents through one endpoint).
Strengths
- One POST /v1/analyze/url ingests video, audio, image, or document; GET /v1/media/search returns each item's title, generated summary, tags, transcript snippet, and a best-moment timestamp.
- Search ranks every 60-second spoken window of every recording as well as the item summary, so a question about a detail nine minutes into a meeting finds the meeting: 14 of 14 right item, 13 of 14 right moment, in a library that also holds unrelated promos, test clips, audio, and documents.
- Each result carries the spoken timestamp and the matching transcript window, so a hit lands you in the recording rather than at its start.
- POST /v1/media/ask answers in words over the whole library, no media id required: 12 of 14 correct, including the marketing expert, the dog-tail anecdote, the brief, the stage count, the revenue target, the unit-cost ceiling, and the international-market concerns, each with a deep link to the moment in the report.
- Library search covers documents and audio alongside video, and results carry content warnings and labels from the analysis pipeline.
Limitations
- Two answers missed: the beagle drawing was attributed to Andrew instead of Laura (the same slip Twelve Labs made), and "what is the planned selling price?" was answered as not in the library because the word "price" routes the question to the assistant's platform-knowledge path instead of the media search.
- Answer calls average 8.3 s (5.9 to 11.0 s).
- The one moment miss: "who is the marketing expert?" pointed to 1:00, 18 seconds before the introduction at 1:18-1:30; the returned timestamp is the centre of a 60-second window, so it can be up to 30 seconds from the sentence.
- 2.55 s mean search latency, nine times Twelve Labs.
- Subscription plus per-minute analysis ($0.22 to $0.58/min) is the highest ingestion cost here for a large library.
Pricing: Subscription $9-49/month plus analysis usage: audio+video $0.58/min (Starter) to $0.43/min (Agency); audio-only $0.37 to $0.22/min; search included
Twelve Labs · Best for developers building video search and video Q&A into their own product
Ranked clips with start/end times plus Pegasus answers from one SDK, free for 600 minutes; 10 of 14 answers correct, though its moment ranking put the right clip first for only 4 of 14 questions.
Strengths
- Pegasus answered 10 of 14 questions correctly in one sentence, including all three financial figures and the design brief.
- Search returns ranked clips with start/end times; the right moment was in the top three for 7 of 14 questions. 0.27 s mean search latency.
- Free plan: 600 minutes of indexing and no card; index, search, and analyze all reachable from the SDK.
Limitations
- Moment ranking put the right clip first for only 4 of 14 questions: "who is the project manager?" returned the whale-drawing explanation, "how many design stages?" the finance discussion, and the whiteboard icebreaker question the dog anecdote.
- Two answers described people visually instead of naming them ("the woman with long dark hair", "the man with pink hair") and one attributed the beagle drawing to the wrong participant.
- Answer calls average 32 s each; each is a separate Pegasus invocation billed on input minutes, so asking 14 questions of a 10-minute video costs about $4 on the Developer plan.
- Video only: no audio-file, PDF, or document ingestion.
Pricing: Free 600 minutes; Developer: Marengo indexing $0.042/min, Search API $4 per 1,000 queries, Pegasus analyze $0.0292/min input + $0.0075 per 1k output tokens
Google · Best for individuals and small teams who want to question a fixed set of sources and get cited answers, for free
Source-grounded chat with inline citations across up to 50 uploaded sources per notebook at no cost; a notebook tool, not a library API.
Strengths
- Free Standard tier: 100 notebooks per user and 50 sources per notebook, including video, audio, PDFs, and web pages, per Google's plan documentation.
- Answers cite the passage they came from, and notebooks generate summaries, audio overviews, and study material from the same sources.
- Higher limits (up to 600 sources per notebook) through Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra plans or Workspace licences.
Limitations
- Not run in this test: it requires a Google account and we did not create one for the echosaw.com domain.
- No public API for ingesting sources or querying a notebook; everything goes through the web or mobile app.
- Per-notebook source caps make it a set of notebooks, not one searchable library; sources must be re-added per notebook.
Pricing: Free (Standard: 100 notebooks, 50 sources each); higher limits with Google AI Plus, Pro, Ultra, or qualifying Workspace plans
Mixpeek · Best for engineering teams that want a managed extraction-and-retrieval layer over their own object storage, or a vector database for embeddings they already have
A retrieval platform rather than an end-user tool: point it at a bucket, choose extractors, and query through hybrid (dense, sparse, BM25) retrievers; $25/month minimum, no free tier.
Strengths
- Managed mode extracts, embeds, and indexes video, image, audio, and documents from connected object storage, per the pricing and quickstart pages.
- Retrieval features documented include hybrid search, semantic joins across namespaces, aggregations, multi-stage pipelines, and per-agent budget limits.
- Standalone (bring-your-own-vectors) mode from $1.56 per million vectors per month.
Limitations
- Not run in this test: there is no free tier, and the Build plan carries a $25/month minimum.
- No summaries, transcripts, or answers out of the box; it returns matching objects and features, and you build the question-answering step.
- Build plan is capped at 100K objects/month, 25 collections, and 5 namespaces; Scale is $250/month minimum.
Pricing: Build $25/month minimum (metered processing, up to 100K objects/month); Scale $250/month minimum; Enterprise from $10,000/month
Fireflies.ai · Best for teams whose library is their own meetings, recorded by a bot on Zoom, Meet, or Teams
A meeting-notes product with search and an AI assistant (AskFred) over every recorded meeting, with API access on the free plan, but the library is limited to meetings and uploaded recordings.
Strengths
- Free plan lists meeting search, AskFred AI assistant, audio/video file upload, and API access, per the pricing page.
- GraphQL API exposes sentences with timestamps, speaker analytics, and generated summaries per transcript.
- Transcription in 100+ languages; Business plan adds unlimited transcription and storage.
Limitations
- Not run in this test: sign-in is Google, Microsoft, or SSO only, and we had none of those for the echosaw.com address.
- Ingests meetings and audio/video files only; no documents or images.
- Free plan has limited storage and AI credits; downloading transcripts and summaries requires Pro ($18/seat/month monthly, $10 annually).
Pricing: Free; Pro $18/seat/month or $10 billed annually; Business $29 or $19 annually; Enterprise $39/seat/month annual only
Frequently asked questions
- Which tool found the right moment most often?
- Echosaw: the right item first for 14 of 14 questions in a 17-item library and the single returned moment inside the gold span for 13 of 14. Twelve Labs, indexing only the test video, put the right clip first for 4 of 14 and had it in the top three for 7 of 14.
- Which tool answered the questions correctly?
- Echosaw 12 of 14 (POST /v1/media/ask, asked over the whole library) and Twelve Labs 10 of 14 (Pegasus analyze, asked of the one video). Echosaw's misses were the beagle attributed to the wrong participant and the selling-price question, which the assistant routed to its platform-knowledge path (the word "price") instead of the library. Twelve Labs' misses were two answers that described a person visually instead of naming them, one wrong attribution of the beagle drawing, and one garbled phrase ("hardest dinner"). NotebookLM and Fireflies answer questions in their apps but were not run.
- Is there an AI that can watch videos and answer questions about them?
- Yes. Two of the tools here were measured doing exactly that on a 10-minute meeting video with 14 questions: Echosaw answered 12 of 14 correctly through POST /v1/media/ask over a 17-item library, and Twelve Labs (Pegasus analyze) answered 10 of 14 on the one indexed video. NotebookLM and Fireflies (AskFred) also answer questions about uploaded video in their apps but were not run in this test; Mixpeek returns matching objects and leaves the answering step to you.
- Twelve Labs alternative: what else does video search?
- Echosaw is the closest measured alternative: like Twelve Labs it has an API for ingestion and search, and in our test it put the right moment first for 13 of 14 questions against Twelve Labs' 4 of 14, while also ingesting audio, images, and documents that Twelve Labs does not. Twelve Labs keeps the edge on search latency (0.27 s vs 2.55 s) and price (600 free minutes, then $0.042/min indexing). Mixpeek is a developer alternative that extracts and indexes video from your own object storage ($25/month minimum, no answers out of the box); NotebookLM and Fireflies cover video search in an app rather than an API.
- NotebookLM alternative for video?
- NotebookLM is free, cites its sources, and accepts video, audio, PDFs, and web pages, but it has no public API and caps each notebook at 50 sources on the Standard tier. If you need one searchable library with API access, Echosaw (video, audio, images, documents; 14 of 14 right item and 12 of 14 answers in our test) or Twelve Labs (video only; 10 of 14 answers, free 600 minutes) are the measured options here. If your library is your own meetings, Fireflies records them and answers questions through AskFred with API access on its free plan.
- Why is Echosaw ranked first on its own list?
- On the rubric: retrieval accuracy (35) Echosaw 33, Twelve Labs 14; answer quality (25) Echosaw 21, Twelve Labs 18; ingestion breadth and access (20) Echosaw 18, Twelve Labs 12; price (20) Echosaw 9, Twelve Labs 17. Totals 81 and 61. Twelve Labs wins on price and is nine times faster per search; Echosaw wins on finding the right item and moment in a mixed library and edges the answer count. NotebookLM remains free, cites its sources, and accepts more media types, but we could not measure it.
- Why were Mixpeek, NotebookLM, and Fireflies not measured?
- Mixpeek has no free tier (Build plan is a $25/month minimum). NotebookLM needs a Google account and Fireflies signs in only with Google, Microsoft, or SSO; we did not create those for the echosaw.com domain in this round. All three are marked documentation-verified and have no figures in the results table.
- How can I reproduce these results?
- The question set (queries.json), runner (run.py), scorer (score.py), and every raw response are published at echosaw.com/curated-lists/harness/kb/. Ingest the first 600 seconds of AMI ES2002a into the service, set the API key environment variables listed in run.py, run it per provider, then run score.py on the output directory.