Okay, let's talk about summarizing YouTube videos. That's what you're here for. So we are going to get right into it. Got a couple of recommendations, some tools I've used, some tools I've been using, um, as well as one that I think, uh, other people might want, but, uh, I haven't used it extensively, but I'm going to show you how to use it as another option.
So, uh, these are all free options you can use and I'm getting in, uh, at the end, I'll tell you a little bit more about maybe why you want to go this route or why you may want to use the service. Um, that can summarize for you or do some other things on top of it. But that said, let's transition and get into the tools that you can use. Okay, so for the first one, I want to talk about the 8Fi app or Chrome extension.
I'm going to hop over. I wanted to show you real quick this lovely picture in the still frame of myself. But you can see over here, we've now got a little extra little button here on the YouTube page itself, which is kind of handy.
But let's hop over here. and check it out. So this is, and I'll include the link, a Chrome extension. So easy to install, free, pop it in, and you're good to go.
All right, you come over to the video you want, and you can click here, you can click here. Let's just click the button. And I had already summarized this, so it's pretty quick.
It does take a little bit of time, and obviously that's going to depend on the length of the video. This is about a 19-minute video, so it might take a few minutes. So I have already gotten the timestamp summaries.
And then let's go over here, top comments. We can skip those sections. Okay, so key insights.
When I went through here, I was pretty happy. I think that it does a good job of summarizing and retaining the important points. And I like that it does show up on the page.
Again, for the sake of the video, I don't want to slow things down and sit here and, you know, have us all twiddle our thumbs while I wait for it. It's not lengthy, but again, probably 10-ish, 15 seconds to summarize. and then going over to the timestamp summary same thing doing it again if that's not a problem for you it's not a big deal for me when i occasionally want to do something like this something i really like with this of course you can click on that and you can see it's going to take you to that point in the video i think that that's really useful and something that's in the tool that i'm creating or created for myself which i'll talk about but that saves you a ton of time because let's say you're watching this video on my workflow And you want to come in and talk, oh, I just really want to hear about Readwise.
I don't need to know about Instant Paper, Roam, and how that all comes together. You can skip to nine minutes. You've now cut out nine minutes of having to get to that point.
So super helpful, easy to install, and you can use it for free. So if that is of interest to you, check it out. Also, if you need more, just Google YouTube Summarizer YouTube extension, and you will find a ton. Give them a shot. Find out which one works best for you.
There's also some great articles on this. I found this one medium.com geek culture article that had a few of course readwise is mentioned on here. That is not free, but there's several other tools up here that create chapters, things like that. So that is also a good one. Okay, so now let's try something a little bit different instead of something that operates as a Chrome extension that we have to install.
That's kind of always there. Maybe you don't want that. You don't need it, whatever it might be.
Let's do a one off. This is definitely one of the original tools that at least I came across. Really simple, really effective, great for doing a one-off.
And it's summarize.tech. I apologize, you can look it up and find out the guy who made it. But I believe he was definitely one of the first to use GPT for summarizing videos and at least doing it publicly.
And is a developer and has left this up, which is great. Because I'm sure there's some added expenses going on with this. And there's a lot of tools. Keep in mind that there is a fee.
It may be small, especially for short videos. It may be really small, but it adds up. So if you do use these tools and there is a way to donate or help people out, you can, by all means, do that. There is a cost to doing this, especially if you're using it for free.
None of these tools, unless people are using some sort of locally run thing, but even then they've got to have either a server or something like that. Support them if you can. And let's take a look at how this works now. So we'll take the video URL, same video. Let's pop it in over here, click submit, and it's going to do its thing.
So as usual, you can see we got a little bit of a bar. We're going in the background and this is pretty speedy. So we go, okay, zero to 15, we get an overall summary. Helpful.
You know, here we go. Adam from productivity described how he manages. Okay, we got the other stuff looks like they misspelled Tiago Forte, but that's okay.
Let's see more. okay that's nice so breaks it down now instead of the full video we get basically five minute chunks and then talking about those sections so this is fairly similar to timestamp sections over here. Okay. And if we click on it, so let's go to the five minutes, then we hop right to five.
I will pause that so we don't have to listen to that. So that's really effective. If you just have some one-off videos that you want and you could bookmark this page, come back to that. So I think, you know, you can see the two different ways of doing things here. There's a tool like a Chrome extension, something that's kind of always there.
As a free option that you can use, some of these probably will eventually or might already start making you use your own ChatGPT API key, which makes sense so that they're not paying for it. But also there's the one-offs like this, like Summarize Tech, where you can go and paste it in. Less handy in the sense that, you know, you do need to open it up and go there.
But if they're truly free and you don't use it that often, these can be great tools. So from here, what you would need to do, let's say, you know, you want this summary piece. Well, then you just copy and paste that into whatever tool you're using. If you're using something like Roam Research, Obsidian, Notion, you would then need to take that. And that can be the downside of this.
If you are doing this a lot, this is where a paid tool might come in handy because you can automatically get those highlights in there. And I apologize for being distracted by my cat down there. Hello, Zoe.
All right. Now, what I was saying with this is if you want to take these highlights and you want to be doing this, you know, you're doing this multiple times a day, you're reading a lot of articles, you're going through a lot of videos, then what you might want to do, again, is use something like Readwise where you're highlighting and then it's going into your, you know, note system of choice. But again, if you either the cost or is prohibitive or the time is not an issue, then, you know, you can certainly do something like this and copy and paste into it.
um the one thing I will mention um is summarily so this is an app I developed basically for myself I had written a python script uh gosh I think I started in 2022 um you know to do YouTube summaries because I do get a ton of value out of YouTube I'm not only creating the videos but I also watch a lot of videos there's a lot of helpful information on there but I can't you know even come close to staying up to date with all of the videos nobody can I think there's something like 500 of hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube. So just for the channels that you're subscribed to, it's nice to stay up to date and know what's going on. So that's why I kind of took my Python script and went a step further. So you can go to summarily.app, that's S-U-M-M-A-R-I-L-Y.app, find out a little bit more, and you can sign up for early access notification if you want to. What I'm doing with this to help myself, again, building this kind of for myself, was I can add in the channels I'm subscribed to, right?
Click a button, add them in, and then I get an email digest. Or you can just go back to the web app and see, oh, hey, since I, you know, the last one, there's been seven new videos. Okay, great.
Here's a quick summary of that. And then here's the timestamp summaries of that. And again, that's getting it to you so you can deal with it when you want to instead of having to go on YouTube, find out three hours later you've been watching too many cat videos. and then wonder, oh crap, what was I here for in the first place?
So again, I think this is good, but again, there will be a fee for this. This can't be free. There's server things to do.
There's the chat GPT to use. There's lots of things going on. But for myself, this was going to be important.
And so I bring this up again for yourself to say, if you need something like this, consider what is your use case and how frequently you use it and what's the value you get out of it. if you could stay up to date on you know maybe the programming channels you're following uh the productivity uh maybe the business uh you know whatever it is all these channels what's that worth to you the time savings especially if you're using it in a professional setting and kind of go from there but again if you just need it for a few one-offs there's some great free tools out there and i would like to with summarily offer at some point some sort of a free option but to get started it uh just wasn't available but i can head over to smarily.app check it out see if that's for you otherwise use some of these other great tools i've gone through if you got any comments questions just leave them and i will get back to you thanks