We've all been there - searching for a quick answer or a specific piece of information in a YouTube video, only to find ourselves frustrated by lengthy videos filled with unnecessary content.

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The struggle to navigate through these long videos often leads to fast-forwarding or skipping, which can result in missing out on important details. It was this frustration that led me on a quest to create my own YouTube video summarizer, ensuring that I could easily access the information I needed without the hassle of sifting through lengthy content.

The Problem

The problem is simple: YouTube videos can be too long, and we often just want a concise summary of the key points. While manually copying and pasting the transcript of a video to a note-taking tool or searching for written summaries can be a solution, it's not always efficient or fun. This is where technology comes to the rescue.

The Solution: Using LLM chatbot API

My journey to develop a YouTube video summarizer began with the idea of using the ChatGPT API. The process involved three main steps:

• Accessing the YouTube API to fetch video transcripts.
• Utilizing the ChatGPT API to create a summary of the video.
• Making this process accessible and user-friendly.

Let's dive into each of these steps.

Step 1: Accessing the YouTube API

The first step was to access the YouTube API to retrieve video transcripts. Fortunately, YouTube provides an API that allows developers to access a video's transcript (if available) and other metadata. With this API, I was able to fetch the content of the video, which served as the foundation for creating the video summarizer.

Step 2: Leveraging the ChatGPT API

With the video transcript in hand, it was time to create a concise summary of the video. My initial thought was to use the ChatGPT API for this purpose. However, I soon discovered that the ChatGPT API was not entirely free to use beyond a certain limit. This led me to search for a more cost-effective alternative while still maintaining the power of AI-driven summarization.

Step 3: Discovering Hugging Face's HuggingChat

My search for a free alternative brought me to Hugging Face's HuggingChat, another language model capable of summarizing text. However, there was no official API available for HuggingChat at that time. Fortunately, I stumbled upon an open-source API created by a developer who shared my vision of making this technology accessible.

The Final Solution

Bringing all the pieces together, I successfully created a YouTube video summarizer that anyone could use with ease. Here's how it works:

Provide a YouTube video link.
Fetch the video transcript using the YouTube API (if available).
Use the open-source HuggingChat API to summarize the video content.
The result is a concise and informative summary of the video, giving you access to the key points and information you need without the hassle of sifting through lengthy content.

The code is on GitHub here
Give it a try, and let me know how that works for you!