Summarize YouTube Videos with Detailed Transcripts

This skill extracts transcripts from YouTube videos and generates comprehensive, verbose summaries using a STAR + R-I-S-E prompting framework, prioritizing completeness over brevity. Its five-step workflow, each shown with a visual progress gauge and status box, is: validate the YouTube URL and extract the video ID (supporting youtube.com/watch, youtu.be, and mobile URL formats); check video and transcript availability via youtube_transcript_api.list_transcripts(), handling TranscriptsDisabled/NoTranscriptFound/private-video errors with specific user-facing messages; extract the transcript with language preference and fallback (e.g. Portuguese first, English fallback), combining segments into coherent full text and saving it to a temporary file; generate the comprehensive summary by applying the STAR + R-I-S-E framework to the transcript, structuring output into an executive synthesis, detailed section-by-section breakdown, key insights and conclusions, concepts/terminology, and resources/references; and format the final Markdown output with video metadata (title, channel, duration, URL, publish date), a detailed summary broken into topics and subtopics, a concepts/terminology glossary, and a conclusion.

Before processing any video, it validates that Python 3 and the youtube-transcript-api library are available, offering to install the dependency via pip if missing and confirming successful installation before proceeding, handled as an explicit yes/no prompt rather than a silent auto-install. It also offers a save option letting the user choose to keep just the summary or the summary plus the raw transcript, written to a dated Markdown file.

Use this skill when a user provides a YouTube URL and wants a detailed summary, needs to document video content for reference without rewatching it, wants insights/key points/arguments extracted from educational content, needs a raw transcript for further analysis, or explicitly asks to "summarize," "resume," or "extract content" from a YouTube video - especially when comprehensive documentation is wanted over a short blurb.

It cannot proceed if the video's transcripts are disabled or none exist (auto-generated or manual), and it depends on the youtube-transcript-api Python library being installed - if the user declines the offered installation, the skill cannot extract transcripts and the task cannot complete via this path.

Input is a YouTube video URL in a supported format. Output is a structured Markdown document with video metadata, a comprehensive section-by-section summary following the STAR + R-I-S-E framework, a concepts/terminology glossary, and a conclusion, optionally saved to a dated file alongside the raw transcript.

pip install youtube-transcript-api

Built on the Python youtube-transcript-api library (list_transcripts(), get_transcript() with language fallback) and an AI model (Claude/GPT) applying the STAR + R-I-S-E summarization prompt to the extracted transcript text.

Users who need thorough content analysis and reference documentation from educational videos, lectures, or tutorials - extracting the full substance of a video without watching it end to end.