68 minutes of talking, read in about a minute

Sample coming soon

Switch to Transcript and the same episode is there in full, with a timestamp on every paragraph. That is the part the summary is built from, and the part you check it against.

What a YouTube video summarizer does

A YouTube video summarizer turns the spoken words of a video into a short piece of prose you can read in a minute. This one writes the summary from a full transcript and keeps that transcript, so every claim in the summary can be traced back to the moment in the video it came from.

The summary, and the transcript it came from

Sample coming soon. Paste your own link above to see the real thing.

Real output of one sample job, unedited: the first paragraph of the summary, then the first three paragraphs of the transcript with the times they were said. Nothing here was written by hand.

Every point is checkable

A summary you cannot verify is a guess you have to trust. The transcript stays in the next tab, so you read a claim, click into the transcript and hear it said. Nothing is thrown away once the summary is written.

Written in the video's language

The summary comes back in the language that is spoken in the video, not in English by default. A Polish interview is summarized in Polish, a Japanese briefing in Japanese.

Videos up to 12 hours

A video can run to 12 hours. Long ones are transcribed in chunks and come back as one transcript and one summary, so a three-hour meeting does not have to be cut up by hand first.

Pasting it into a chat tool vs doing it here

Pasting it into a chat tool vs doing it here
FeatureCopy into a chat toolYoutubeToText
Getting the textCopy YouTube's panel, when the video has oneThe audio is transcribed, captions not needed
A long videoYou split it and paste it in partsOne job, up to 12 hours
Checking a lineThe summary is all you keptThe transcript stays, timestamped
SpeakersLost in the copyLabelled, and you can rename them
Cost of the summaryA chat subscriptionNo minutes on top of the transcript

How it works

  1. 1

    Paste the link and choose Transcription

    The engine listens to the audio of the video and writes it out, so it works on videos that have no captions and on ones whose auto captions are poor.

  2. 2

    Open the Summary tab

    Click Generate summary. One request goes out and a few paragraphs come back, under a single Summary heading, in the language spoken in the video.

  3. 3

    Check it against the transcript

    Switch to Transcript and click any timestamp to jump the video to that paragraph. This is the step the summary alone cannot give you.

  4. 4

    Copy or export

    Copy the summary straight into your notes, or export the transcript as Word or plain text, with speakers and timestamps on or off.

Things worth knowing

It is prose, not a section list

The summary is a few paragraphs under one Summary heading. It has no bullet points, no section headings and no timestamps, because the timestamps are stripped out of the transcript before the summary is written and the instruction is to write paragraphs rather than lists. That is the right shape for reading and the wrong shape for navigating. To navigate, use the transcript: every paragraph carries a time, and Find shows you each place a term was said with its timestamp beside it. If you want chapters or an outline with times, ask the built-in AI on a job you own. It reads the first 24,000 characters of the transcript, which is roughly 25 to 35 minutes of speech, so on a long video it sees the opening and not the end.

Translate first and the summary follows the translation

The summary is written in the language of the text it is given, and the order you work in decides what that text is. Summarize first and you get the summary in the language spoken in the video. Set a target language first and the transcript is translated, so the summary is written from the translation and comes back in the target language instead. Neither one is wrong, but they are not the same, and switching the target language afterwards does not rewrite a summary you already have. If you want both, generate the summary before you translate, then translate.

A long video on the free plan is summarized as far as it got

A new account starts with 10 free minutes. Paste a two-hour video and you do not get an error: you get a preview covering as many minutes as you have left, with the transcript, the timestamps and the player working on that part. Generate a summary there and it summarizes the preview, because the preview is all the text there is. It will read as a fair summary of the opening and say nothing about the rest, which is easy to mistake for a summary of the whole video. Unlock the video, or take a plan, and the job runs from the start. Generate the summary again afterwards to get one that covers all of it.

The problem in their words

It appears to have captured the gist of the meeting very well, but the fact that the transcript isn't close to an exact match to what was said - and the timestamps are incorrect - means it's very hard to trust the output.
Simon Willison, on summarizing a council meeting
I'm trying to do something technically similar by using LLMs to summarize the meeting transcript from youtube. Right now I'm doing this manually by copy/pasting into ChatGPT but I want to automate this aspect.
puzzydunlop, Hacker News

What a typical 1-hour video costs

Free

10 min

Your first 10 minutes are free. They cover the start of a 1-hour video; the rest is locked until you unlock it.

Just this video

...

One payment for a 1-hour video, 60 minutes. No subscription.

Creator

... / month

600 minutes every month, the smallest plan that covers a 1-hour video.

The Deep Dive

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600 minutes, one payment, credits never expire.

See all plans

FAQ

Questions.
Answered.

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Contact us.

No. The timestamps are removed from the transcript before the summary is written, and the instruction is to write paragraphs rather than lists, so what comes back is prose under one Summary heading. The timestamps live in the transcript next to it, one on every paragraph, and clicking one jumps the video to that second.
No. Minutes are spent when the video is transcribed. Generating the summary afterwards spends none, and neither does generating it again. That is also true of the translation and of the built-in AI, so once a video is transcribed you can work on that text as much as you want without watching a counter.
The language spoken in the video. A Dutch podcast comes back summarized in Dutch. There is one exception worth knowing: if you set a target language first, the transcript is translated and the summary is then written from that translation, so it arrives in the target language instead. Generate the summary before translating if you want the original.
Yes. 12 hours is the limit for a single video. Anything over ten minutes is transcribed in chunks and comes back as one transcript, so the summary is written across the whole thing rather than the first part. On the free plan a long video returns a preview instead, and a summary generated there covers only the preview.
Yes. The engine takes the audio of the video and writes it out; it never reads the caption track YouTube shows in its panel. So a video with captions turned off works the same as one with them on, and an old video with poor auto captions is transcribed from the sound rather than from that old text.
No, you ask for it. A finished job opens on the transcript, and the Summary tab holds a Generate summary button until you press it. It is one AI request and it takes a few seconds on a short video and longer on a long one. Once it is made it stays with the job in your account.

Updated August 2026

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