The YouTube Summary plugin appears on the bottom right, below the video window.

Today I’ll start processing through my videos. I’ll create posts for entire book club series on zibaldone.net, where all the YouTube links for a particular book are on a single page. These will be blog posts like this one, but they’ll all be in the category “Video”, so they’ll be easy to find. These pages also include AI-generated summaries, so that what I’m actually doing, beyond making the videos available in a more obvious way to outside viewers, is integrating the metadata from these videos into my own PKM system. The idea is that my output at a particular time on my own videos and the discussions in the book club each week become input for a future me who wants to understand my thinking on a particular issue, as I was developing my thoughts. In that sense, these are just another medium for Source Notes, although they’re longish and will still need to be refined. I asked Grok if there was a good AI app to “listen to” YouTube videos and make summaries or keyword lists, and it suggested a Chrome plugin called “YouTube Summary with ChatGPT and Claude”. It also said (after I asked specifically) that Heptabase can do this too. So I tried that first.

It actually does not work. When I asked Heptabase to summarize a video it thought for a minute and then returned a little summary of features of AI generally and Gemini specifically. The information contained in these summaries is interesting but has nothing to do with the videos I asked it to summarize.

OTOH, the Chrome plug-in did provide a useable transcript (powered by Glasp) and a summary of the main points which was fairly accurate. I used it on a two-hour video of the last book club meeting and it generated a transcript quickly and an 11-bullet summary with time-stamps. That might be useful. I can choose Grok to do the AI summarizing, which I’m already paying for. I had assumed if I chose Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, I’d quickly blast through the free usage limits and be asked to buy a subscription. But apparently it’s based on Glasp alone. You get three free transcriptions and summaries a day, then you have to buy a $10 per month Pro plan. I like Grok’s responses better though, so I’ll stick with its summaries.

But I’ll do it via the extension, because when I compared the Glasp-mediated summary with just pasting the YouTube url into Grok and asking for a bulleted summary, I liked the Grok summary a bit better. But Grok didn’t seem to have access to the entire transcript on its own; only to parts of it that had already been transcribed by YouTube. So ultimately I decided to try Glasp, on a month to month basis.