Building a YouTube Summarizer

Latest AI News

1. Claude 4.1 released and is still the king for code generation

2. ChatGPT-5 released and after a surge of promises is currently getting roasted

3. Microsoft Copilot now has GPT 5 integrated in it.

RESOURCES

Some tools to make life easier. You’re welcome :)

• beehiiv - my choice for a newsletter operating system

• Coefficient - Live connections to 60+ business systems

• Lido - Automate your spreadsheets; accurately extract date from PDFs

• TransactionPro - quickly import, export or delete data in Quickbooks

• Perspective - Build high-converting lead funnel microsites

• Gamma - AI designer for presentations, websites, social posts, and more

• Gratitude Plus - social gratitude journal

• Senja - collect and display testimonials

• OpusClip - turn long videos into short clips

• Carrd - free one-page website builder

• Notion - notetaking + project management + database

• Transistor - my favorite podcast host

• Fathom - AI-powered notetaking app

MAIN ARTICLE

Finding a problem to automate

I live on YouTube.

I mean, not really, but I do spend a lot of time there. And a whole lot of it is learning. It’s become the go to place for where I pick up new skills, where I stay up to date on technologies, and where I turn to for trusted info.

That’s one of the reasons I started my own channel a few years ago. I wanted to help the growing number of people turning to video for solutions to business problems and inefficiencies.

The problem is there’s not enough time to watch it all. I have found myself bookmarking topical videos that I never come back to and stopping videos that are just too long for me to sit through and watch.

I found myself going to transcripts and sifting through them instead.

I found myself copying and pasting the transcript into ChatGPT and getting the summary really quick.

And I found that I could then ask follow-up questions in ChatGPT specific to whatever I was trying to figure out.

I’ve been doing this for months.

I, of all people, should find a way to automate a little bit of this, right?

Knowing kind of how to solve it

I’m no software engineer, but I know a whole lot of tidbits about a whole lot of technologies.

I’ve done web development. I’ve taken engineering courses. I’ve solved my own problems using code in a ton of other areas. I knew I could chip off a little time and streamline the process.

And I’ve always wanted to learn how to build a Chrome Extension.

Perfect opportunity.

I’m deep into the AI tooling game at this point and juggling prompts and conversations between all four of the mainstream LLMs, so I knew this would be a good project for Claude.

Honestly, any of them can do this, but I like Claude’s interface more than the others right now and it’s constantly touted as one of the stronger coding models, so that’s what I went with.

Coding a prototype with AI

I started with this prompt in Claude:

Hi, we're going to make a Chrome extension that with a click of a button downloads the transcript of a youtube video into a txt file.
There are a few steps to this that I'll need help with. The Javascript to get the code downloaded is very easy, but before we can run it sucessfully, we need to interact with the page by clicking the show transcript button (and potentially clicking the ...more button first to show that show transcript button).
Can you sketch out the Javascript first. Only the Javascript. 

Now, even before this, I’d actually opened the developer tools in my web browser, inspected the YouTube transcript on the video page and had Microsoft Copilot write me a script that I ran right there to download the transcript.

It was a dozen lines of code or so and worked perfect. You know what, here’s the code if you want it:

(function() {
    let transcript = "";
    document.querySelectorAll(".segment").forEach(segment => {
        transcript += segment.innerText + "\n";
    });

    // Create a blob and trigger download
    const blob = new Blob([transcript], { type: "text/plain" });
    const a = document.createElement("a");
    a.href = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
    a.download = "video_transcript.txt";
    document.body.appendChild(a);
    a.click();
    document.body.removeChild(a);
})();

So, I knew this would be easy, I just wanted it to be DEAD SIMPLE. The tricky part that I didn’t know was how to get the code to open the window to display the transcript text.

The initial JavaScript I got had some errors that took a little back and forth to fix. But the whole process simply consisted of me copying the errors I was getting into Claude and letting it do its thing to correct the mistakes.

Once I saw working JavaScript code, I asked Claude to scaffold the rest of the needed files for the extension.

I had to ask about EVERYTHING. But this ended up being a fun learning process.

Did you know that Chrome Extensions work on Microsoft Edge just the same as on Google Chrome?

Yup. And here’s some of the other things I found out simply by asking Claude at each step in the process:

• I had to make icons.

• I had to learn how to test it in my browser in developer mode.

• I had to ask about the steps to actually publish on the Chrome Store

• I asked how to make it more fleshed out - with AI interactivity

• I got a full, updated prompt for the summation of YouTube videos

• I added features like a sidebar

• I hit a lot of hurdles - small things that didn’t work exactly right

• I kept iterating and changing and even ended up cutting a couple things that weren’t super useful when I couldn’t easily figure them out.

But, at the end of the day, I got a working extension.

You read that right: it actually works.

Now, it’s no marvel of engineering. And it’s missing advanced features I’d love to add. But it’s a big confidence boost for me to see a working product as a result of a couple hours of working on an idea.

Technical know-how is no longer as big a barrier to build things like this. It’ll sure speed things up, but for someone like me, you can get started without as much knowledge on the front end.

Want to see more details behind the scenes? Let me know - reply to this and tell me to make a video!

P.S. I confess that not all my YouTube time is as productive as it may sound from this project.

I’ve logged quite a few hours from background music channels like this 😁😁

NEXT STEPS

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Cheers, Eamonn
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