youtube

What This Skill Does

The YouTube skill enables OpenClaw to perform deep research and content analysis on the world's largest video platform. By integrating the YouTube Data API v3, it acts as a research assistant capable of searching for relevant content, summarizing video details, retrieving channel insights, and extracting transcripts. This allows you to process hours of video content into actionable text data, making it an essential tool for creators, researchers, and developers who need to digest multimedia information efficiently.

Installation

Installation is a two-step process focusing on setting up the MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. First, globally install the primary dependency via npm: npm install -g zubeid-youtube-mcp-server. Next, obtain a YouTube Data API v3 key from the Google Cloud Console. Once you have the key, configure it within your ~/.clawdbot/clawdbot.json configuration file under the skills section. For developers preferring direct access, ensure the repository is cloned and built from source. A fallback mechanism using yt-dlp is recommended to ensure high availability for transcript extraction if API quotas are reached or specific subtitles are unavailable through standard routes.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for developers summarizing technical tutorials, marketing teams tracking competitor channels, or students conducting academic research. It automates the tedious process of manual transcription and channel monitoring. You can create automated workflows to track industry trends by fetching the latest video uploads from specific channels or generate searchable knowledge bases by piping video transcripts directly into local vector stores.

Example Prompts

1. "Search for the latest tutorials on building an agentic workflow in Python and give me a summary of the top 3 videos."
2. "Get the transcript for the YouTube video at https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z-FRe5AKmCU and summarize the key technical takeaways."
3. "Who is the owner of channel UCSHZKyawb77ixDdsGog4iWA and what are their most popular recent videos?"

Tips & Limitations

To maximize the utility of this skill, monitor your Google Cloud API usage to stay within the daily free tier limits. If the MCP server fails, the yt-dlp fallback is a robust alternative for transcript extraction, though it requires Python environment management. Note that transcript availability depends on whether the video creator has provided closed captions or if YouTube's auto-generated subs are enabled. For better accuracy in research, always verify video publication dates and ensure your search queries are specific.