#45: Youtube Summarizer - Obsidian Plugin

Problem

YouTube has many long, high-quality videos, and I love watching them. For example, the MIT course How to Speak or the Huberman lab episode on Dopamine.

While watching them, I often think to myself, "How can I better engage with this amazing content?".

Thinking more over this question, I realized I have 3 more specific problems:

1. Is this video worth watching at all?

2. What is discussed in this video with a bit more detail than in the description/timestamps?

3. How can I recap a video that I watched before?

Solution

I have built an Obsidian plugin called Youtube Summarizer that fetches the transcripts of YouTube videos and summarizes them using Open AI's ChatGPT.

Go to Obsidian, create a note, fetch the URL to the plugin and let it create the summary. This summary is a great starting point, first to decide whether to watch a video at all. Then, it allows you to see what is discussed reasonably comprehensively yet briefly. You can edit the summary/add your own notes if you wish. Then, later, when you want to recap the video, you can simply review your notes.

You can check out the demo here.

How to download

Go here and click install.

Alternatively, open Obsidian Settings and go to Community Plugins. Search for Youtube Summarizer and click install.

Setting OpenAI Key

This plugin needs an OpenAI key to summarize the transcript. Go to Open AI Platform, create an API Key and paste the key in the Open AI Key field in Obsidian Settings > Community Plugins > Youtube Summarizer.