YouTube video summarizer — get a summary and notes from a link.

A short summary. A few sentences that say what the video is about and what it concludes, so you can decide whether the whole thing is worth your time.

Key points. The main claims, steps or arguments as a list, in plain words, ready to paste into your own notes.

A timeline. The topics in the order they appear, each with the time it starts in the video, so you can jump straight to the part you care about.

Chapters for your own videos. Publishing on YouTube? The YouTube timestamp generator turns the same timeline into chapters for the description, and makes links to any moment.

Extras when the video has them. Action items, decisions, open questions and important terms appear when the video actually contains them, and are left out when it does not.

Copy and download. Copy the notes, download them as a Markdown file, or download the caption text as a .txt file to keep with the summary.

Need every word instead? The YouTube transcript generator shows the full caption text with a time on each line, each linking to that moment in the video.

Say a colleague sends you a link to a 40-minute conference talk about database indexing and asks what you think. Paste the link above, leave the notes language on English, and select Get notes.

A little later you see a four-sentence summary of the talk, seven key points such as when a composite index helps and when it only slows down writes, and a timeline that shows the benchmark results start around the 27-minute mark.

You read the summary, open the video at the benchmark section to check the numbers, and reply with a considered answer in a fraction of the time the whole talk would have taken.

Some videos have no captions at all: the creator turned them off, the video is very new, or YouTube could not generate them for the language. The summarizer then shows a message instead of notes, because it only reads captions and never transcribes the video's sound.

If you have the video as a file, for example your own recording, choose it in the file box below the link instead. Your browser extracts the audio, only the audio is sent to be transcribed, and you get the same summary, key points and timeline.

You can also use the Chrome extension, which reads the transcript on the YouTube page itself when one is shown there.

Long videos are fine. A full lecture or a two-part podcast episode usually has captions small enough to summarize in one go, and the timeline helps most on exactly those videos. If the captions of a very long video are too large, the page tells you.

The notes do not have to be in the language of the video. Use the notes language picker above the link to get an English summary of a German interview, or French notes from an English lecture. Leave it on Auto to keep the video's own language.

When a video has captions in several languages, the audio language picker chooses which track is read. On Auto-detect, the video's default track is used.