edison-youtube-full

What This Skill Does

The edison-youtube-full skill acts as a comprehensive command-line interface for the YouTube Data API, specifically designed for AI agents to interact with YouTube's vast video database. It simplifies complex workflows like searching for content, extracting metadata for specific videos, channels, and playlists, and retrieving full text transcripts. By encapsulating these operations into discrete, reusable Python scripts, the skill ensures that agents can programmatically gather video intelligence—such as trending topics, creator content strategy, or educational material—directly into their processing pipelines. The output is consistently returned in JSON format, making it ideal for downstream analysis, summarization, or indexing tasks.

Installation

To install this skill, use the ClawHub manager: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/edisonchenai/edison-youtube-full. After installation, ensure you have a valid YouTube Data API v3 key from the Google Cloud Console. Set this key in your environment using export YOUTUBE_API_KEY="YOUR_KEY" or pass it as an argument during script execution. Ensure the required Python dependencies are installed by running pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt within your project directory. This setup is crucial for enabling the interaction between the local agent scripts and the YouTube API services.

Use Cases

This skill is highly effective for content creators, researchers, and data-driven agents. Key use cases include: 1) Automated Market Research: Extracting transcripts from competitor videos to analyze industry trends. 2) Intelligent Curation: Fetching all video metadata from a specific channel or playlist to build a custom search engine. 3) Content Summarization: Automatically pulling subtitles from long-form content for fast knowledge distillation. 4) Media Monitoring: Searching for specific keyword mentions across YouTube to keep a pulse on brand sentiment or public opinion.

Example Prompts

1. "Search for the latest 5 videos about 'AI agents' on YouTube and list their titles and IDs."
2. "Get the full transcript of the video with ID dQw4w9WgXcQ in English and save the content for a summary."
3. "Fetch all video IDs from the playlist PLBCF2DAC6FFB574DE and return their view counts and publishing dates."

Tips & Limitations

• Rate Limiting: The YouTube Data API has a daily quota (usually 10,000 units). Use batching features (providing multiple IDs at once) to optimize consumption.
• Transcript Availability: Not all videos have human-readable transcripts. If the script fails, try targeting --languages auto for auto-generated captions.
• Data Freshness: API data may have a slight lag compared to the live YouTube interface.
• Security: Never hardcode your API key into scripts; use environment variables to prevent leakage.