video-transcript

What This Skill Does

The video-transcript skill is a powerful utility for OpenClaw that enables seamless extraction of spoken content from online videos, primarily targeting YouTube. By leveraging the TranscriptAPI service, this skill bridges the gap between multimedia content and text-based analysis. Whether you are conducting academic research, summarizing long-form lectures, or simply looking to extract specific information from a tutorial, this tool automates the process of converting audio streams into structured, searchable transcripts with optional timestamps and metadata.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the command clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/therohitdas/video-transcript in your terminal. Upon initial use, if no API key is detected, the agent will guide you through an authentication flow. You will be prompted to provide your email address to register via node ./scripts/tapi-auth.js register, followed by a verification step where you enter the OTP sent to your inbox. Once verified, your API credentials are securely stored in ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json, with the existing configuration file safely backed up as a .bak file to prevent data loss.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for content creators, students, and professionals who frequently consume video media. Use it to:

1. Research: Quickly gather evidence or quotes from academic YouTube videos without manually scrubbing through hours of footage.
2. Documentation: Convert complex technical tutorials into a written format for easier study and implementation.
3. Accessibility: Generate readable text versions of videos for users who prefer reading or need accessibility aids.
4. Content Repurposing: Extract script content to turn video insights into blog posts, summaries, or structured meeting notes.

Example Prompts

1. "Please transcribe this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ so I can turn the lyrics into a blog post."
2. "Can you get the text from this video for me? I need the main points summarized for my research notes."
3. "Convert this YouTube video to text and include the timestamps so I can jump to the relevant sections later."

Tips & Limitations

• The skill defaults to a structured JSON format if you need to programmatically process the data; use the text format for general readability.
• Ensure your TRANSCRIPT_API_KEY is correctly set in your environment or the configuration file for uninterrupted access.
• The tool works best with YouTube URLs but can handle individual 11-character video IDs directly.
• Remember that the accuracy of the transcript is dependent on the quality of the video's original audio and closed caption availability.