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Show HN: YouTube Summaries Using GPT

147 pointsby ax8080over 2 years ago
Hi, I&#x27;m Alex. I created Eightify to take my mind off things during a weekend, but I was surprised that my friends were genuinely interested in it. I kept going, and now it&#x27;s been nine weeks since I started.<p>I got the idea to summarize videos when my friend sent me a lengthy video again. This happens to me often; the video title is so enticing, and then it turns out to be nothing. I had been working with GPT for 6 months by the time, so everything looked like a nail to me.<p>It&#x27;s a Chrome extension, and I&#x27;m offering 5 free tries for videos under an hour. After that, you have to buy a package. I&#x27;m not making money yet, but it pays for GPT, which can be pricey for long texts. And some of Lex Fridman&#x27;s podcasts are incredibly long.<p>I&#x27;m one of those overly optimistic people when it comes to GPT. So many people tell me, &quot;Oh, it doesn&#x27;t solve this problem yet; let&#x27;s wait for GPT-4&quot;. The real issue is that their prompts are usually inadequate, and it takes you anywhere from two days to two weeks to make it work. Testing and debugging, preferably with automated tests. I believe you can solve many problems with GPT-3 already.<p>I would love to answer any questions you have about the product and GPT in general. I&#x27;ve invested at least 500 hours into prompt engineering. And I enjoy watching other people&#x27;s prompts too!

33 comments

timetraveller26over 2 years ago
I think is funny that in the near future people are going to use ChatGPT to pad their content and then consumers are going to use it reversely to get a summary.
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nebula8804over 2 years ago
This app shows how dangerous it is to trust ChatGPT for anything even somewhat important.<p>I just threw in a simple example news video and while it did summarize the video somewhat accurately(it got senator Joe Manchin&#x27;s name wrong), it missed complete segments! (the &quot;Goodbye Toyota e-TNGA&quot; segment)<p>[1]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UM4n1Isfr6E">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=UM4n1Isfr6E</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;RyFStVm.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;RyFStVm.png</a>
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jpeterover 2 years ago
This is the death of all tutorial video that strech 1 minute of information to a 20 minute video
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_Algernon_over 2 years ago
It would be nice if you didn&#x27;t have to log in with your google account to use it, or at least that it didn&#x27;t request excessive PII, such as name and profile picture.<p>There is no reason to request more than email.
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Destinerover 2 years ago
This is a neat project, but it also makes me wonder how much useful information is actually provided by an average YouTube video.<p>Taking the headphone review on the landing page as an example, the generated summary is &quot;The Sony XM5s offer improved audio and call quality, but may not be worth the extra cost compared to the XM4s.&quot;<p>Like, duh? You probably could deduce that even without watching the video, 14 mins of your life saved.
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ggregoireover 2 years ago
TIL: was gonna ask how do you get the transcript but YouTube actually provides it, it&#x27;s hidden in the &quot;…&quot; menu next to &quot;Clip&quot;.
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7ewisover 2 years ago
Hey Alex, this is really cool. I&#x27;ve used ChatGPT quite a bit and Stable Diffusion in the past but still feel like I&#x27;ve only scratched the surface of what&#x27;s possible. Great to see lots of projects popping up using the tech in new innovative ways!<p>Please could you give an overview of how this actually works? Have some ideas of where the tech could be useful but not sure how I&#x27;d actually go about implementing it. Do you have a GPT model on a server and code to transcribe the video then summarise the transcription. Or do you use one of the APIs from OpenAI?<p>If you use their APIs:<p>* How costly has it been to run your service? (If you don&#x27;t mind answering)<p>* Is it customisable? If you wanted to run a chat bot for example, would you be able to make it understand the request (I&#x27;d assume something similar to an &#x27;intent&#x27; when developing Alexa skills) and give it data so it knows the answer?
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toddmoreyover 2 years ago
This new level of content understanding &amp; summarizing is huge.<p>My young son uses YouTube for tutorials to learn programming and 3D apps. But I really struggle because he&#x27;s come across objectionable content as well, and the tools YouTube provides for moderation or filtering are completely worthless. They don&#x27;t care. I&#x27;m only left to think they want our kids to see controversial and even radicalizing content because it increases engagement metrics.<p>AI that can prescreen videos?! Regaining some feeling of control and confidence about the content that comes into my house?! I AM SO IN!<p>I have no interest in censoring anyone else or limiting access for others. I just want to have some agency over what my kids are exposed to without removing the actual knowledge share advantages that the internet can and does provide.
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odysseusover 2 years ago
Cool project and great presentation, but do you have any plans for a Safari extension?<p>Apple has supported Chrome extension porting for at least 1 year now, and a conversion tool is built into Xcode: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;safariservices&#x2F;safari_web_extensions&#x2F;converting_a_web_extension_for_safari" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;safariservices&#x2F;saf...</a><p>------------<p>For videos less than 1 hour in length, I prefer <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtubetranscript.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtubetranscript.com</a> , then scroll to about 1&#x2F;2 - 3&#x2F;4 way through the transcript where youtubers generally hide their nuggets of info.<p>Eightify does seem better suited for long Lex Fridman&#x2F;etc. type content though.
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adv0rover 2 years ago
take a look at this chrome extension --&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;youtube-summary-with-chat&#x2F;nmmicjeknamkfloonkhhcjmomieiodli" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;youtube-summary-wi...</a>
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mistercoolover 2 years ago
It would be really great if there was a URL generated with the results of the summary. Then I could save it to Pocket &#x2F; Reader and it would pass through their integrations to Obsidian.
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togumeover 2 years ago
Playing last weekend I extracted the audio using yt-dlp, ran that through Whisper (found the quality of that better than YT subs&#x2F;transcript).<p>However, then I ran into the 2048 token limit for longer videos. Because it doesn’t hold the full context, it wasn’t good enough at summarizing or providing insights.<p>The solution is to do smaller summaries of 2048 chunks recursively until you have a single one.<p>This felt and worked… meh.<p>We’re you able to get around this in some other clever way?
r0flover 2 years ago
Amazing product. Something I will gladly be paying for!<p>You mention that you have invested 500 hours into prompt engineering. Are there any specific resources you would suggest to get maximum value out of GPT? Any videos, websites, podcasts, ebooks, books, anything that really stands out?<p>I have been playing with it for a while now and am getting good at having it spit out what I&#x27;m looking for but usually it takes an extra 3-4 prompts to rearrange the responses that I want.<p>Thanks and again, great execution on a cool idea!
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WrtCdEvrydyover 2 years ago
Target Video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gdl1GKIbaWo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gdl1GKIbaWo</a><p>Video has less than 30K views Free plan is limited to videos less than 1 hour long and with more than 30k views<p>This is a very lame limitation in regards to views. Honestly trying to see if my videos were delivering enough value to justify the title.
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nunezover 2 years ago
This is amazing.<p>I thought of something much more primitive recently: a Reddit bot that transcribes videos behind YouTube links (since I hate watching videos but do like reading).<p>I won&#x27;t use this right now (since I don&#x27;t do Chrome) but will gladly pay for this service when I can throw a YouTube link at it and get back a wall of text (assuming costs are reasonable).
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ntonozziover 2 years ago
Have you compared GPT with prompting to other models like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;sshleifer&#x2F;distilbart-cnn-12-6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;sshleifer&#x2F;distilbart-cnn-12-6</a>? Do you know what the state of the art is in summarization technology?
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_the_special_over 2 years ago
Can you state the price of the &quot;packages&quot; in the landing page?<p>Also, does it always give me 8 bullet points from each video? It would make sense for videos that have chapters to give summaries to each chapter instead.
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dsalzmanover 2 years ago
Really cool Alex! I think it would also be interesting to pull and use the most rewatched data[1] from each video too as an additional weight. That is how I usually skip to the &quot;important&quot; parts without a summary.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;72610552&#x2F;most-replayed-data-of-youtube-video-via-api" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;72610552&#x2F;most-replayed-d...</a>
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dexterdogover 2 years ago
I get the point of charging since the compute resources cost you money, but how are the video rights holders not able to make a claim against any profits?
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seydorover 2 years ago
Now i need an AI to make a video of the summary
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raybbover 2 years ago
If someone else has already summarized the video will I be able to see the summary for free?
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Existenceblinksover 2 years ago
I wonder why there&#x27;s no app capitalize YT comments (don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s api for that or not). Finalized decision often come from reading comments .. it&#x27;s sort of review+debate on both sides and a little bit more authentic.
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paulclarkover 2 years ago
Awesome stuff! What were your biggest learnings from iterations on prompt engineering?
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nacsover 2 years ago
Firefox version planned?<p>Also, please, less Elon on the front page. It&#x27;s a little nauseating.
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nikunjkover 2 years ago
This is great! Can you use the same tech to do for podcasts&#x2F;audio?
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jcq3over 2 years ago
Hello Alex, I&#x27;ve built a similar app for my own usage, I don&#x27;t plan to ship it online. How do you handle token limitation for summarizing lengthy videos?
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bobwernstein1over 2 years ago
I want to search youtube transcripts. Is that possible? Like google search but instead of articles it searching in the transcripts of all youtube videos
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renewiltordover 2 years ago
The way it works is you get the transcript that Google provides and you ship that to GPT-3 and ask it to summarize? Cool tool.
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jdthediscipleover 2 years ago
Awesome idea! Timesavers should be moneymakers in this time.<p>Also, did you get 5000 downloads in a single day?<p>Or when did you launch it?
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mistercoolover 2 years ago
I&#x27;m ready to sign up for a subscription. Hurry up with that! :)
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s0rr0wskillover 2 years ago
How do I sign in with google to use it?
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darau1over 2 years ago
Have you built any GPTs yourself?
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yacine_over 2 years ago
this is great, keep on hacking!
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