How to Connect Jockey to Claude or ChatGPT: A Step-by-Step Guide

This guide connects Jockey to your AI assistant in about five minutes. No code required.

What is Jockey?

Jockey is TwelveLabs’ conversational agent for video and photo libraries. Under the hood, it runs on Marengo (which encodes what’s in your footage — people, objects, audio, on-screen text) and Pegasus (which reasons about it — events, context, why something happened). Ask it a question in plain language, and Jockey searches your library, pulls the relevant clips, and answers with timestamps attached.

You connect it to Claude or ChatGPT as an MCP connector, an extension your assistant can call on, and start asking questions.

What you’ll need

• Claude (desktop or web) or ChatGPT, already installed.

• A Jockey account. Start free at twelvelabs.io/jockey — no credit card required.

• About five minutes.

Step 1: Connect Jockey to your LLM assistant

Pick whichever you use: Claude or ChatGPT

Option A — Claude

1. Open Claude.

2. Go to Customize → Connectors.

   
   

3. Type Jockey into the search bar.

4. Click + button next to Jockey by TwelveLabs.

5. Sign up or log in to your TwelveLabs account. Sign up is free.

Once you're signed in, the screen will automatically direct you back to Claude. Jockey's status in the Connector Directory will show a checkmark. That's it. No server URL or manual setup needed.

Option B — ChatGPT

1. Open ChatGPT.

2. Go to Plugins.

3. Type Jockey in the search bar.

4. Click + button next to Jockey by TwelveLabs.

5. Sign up or log in to your TwelveLabs account. Sign up is free.

6. Once you're signed in, the screen will automatically redirect to ChatGPT, and you will see the Jockey’s connection status as 3 dots, which means it is now connected. 

Step 2: Confirm the connection worked

Go to “new chat”, and copy this into your assistant: “What Jockey tools do you have available?”

Your assistant should describe what Jockey can do — search video content, analyze events, generate summaries, retrieve timestamps, compare content across videos. If you see that response, Jockey is live inside your assistant.

Step 3: Add your videos to Jockey

Before Jockey can search or answer questions, it needs footage in a knowledge store. Pick whichever fits your video:

Option A — Upload your own files

1. In Claude or ChatGPT, ask: "I want to upload a video to Jockey." The first time your assistant calls a Jockey tool, it'll ask you to approve it. Click Allow once (or Always allow).

2. If you already have a knowledge store, Jockey will ask where the new videos should go; if not, it creates one for you automatically.

3. Jockey hands back a secure upload link — open it.

4. Drag in your video file(s) (or upload from Google Drive) and wait for the upload to finish.

5. Back in Claude or ChatGPT, ask Jockey to confirm the video is ready. It usually takes a few minutes for videos to be readily available. It'll report "ready" once encoding and indexing finish.

Option B — Ingest by URL, including YouTube

If your footage is already hosted somewhere public — a YouTube video, for example — you can skip the upload step entirely.

1. Copy the video's URL.

2. In Claude or ChatGPT, ask: "Add this video to my Jockey library: [paste URL]"

3. Jockey pulls the video directly from that URL. No download or upload needed. Select which knowledge store you’d like Jockey to add the video to. If you don’t have an existing knowledge store, create a new one in “Something else”.

Note: Jockey can fetch public YouTube links directly, but it can't currently pull videos from TikTok, Instagram, or Google Drive share links — use Option A for those. Either way, give Jockey a moment to encode and index the footage before your first query. Longer videos take more time.

Step 4: Try it on real footage

A few prompts to get a feel for what Jockey does, using the footage you just added:

• Find a moment: "Find every moment where someone enters a room and give me timestamps."

• Summarize: "Summarize the key events in this video."

• Compare: "Compare how customers interact with the product across these videos."

• Extract insights: "Create a timeline of every product mention and key discussion topic."

Or, more generally:

"Using Jockey, search my videos and identify the most important moments. Explain why each moment matters and include timestamps."

A working answer looks like a grounded response with timestamps and clips cited, not a generic summary — that's Jockey actually reasoning over your footage rather than guessing.

Troubleshooting

• Stuck on authorization: Sign out of your TwelveLabs account in the browser and try again.

• Can't find Jockey in Claude's Connector Directory or ChatGPT Plugins: Confirm your Claude or ChatGPT app is up to date. The directory listing requires a recent version.

• Nothing happens after Connect: Confirm your assistant app is up to date. Connector support requires a recent version.

Start for free

Jockey's free tier is enough to run through everything above on your own videos, no credit card needed. Sign up at twelvelabs.io/jockey, connect it to Claude or ChatGPT using the steps above, upload footage, and ask about the footage in your knowledge store or library right now.