TexTube: Chat with any YouTube video transcript in ChatGPT fast

I actually just finished making a service that does something similar, but it also transforms the transcripts to make them into polished written documents with complete sentences and nice markdown formatting. It also can generate interactive multiple choice quizzes. And it supports editing of the markdown files with revision history and one click hosting.<p>I&#x27;m still doing the last testing of the site, but might as well share it here since it&#x27;s so relevant:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtubetranscriptoptimizer.com&#x2F;</a><p>There might still be a few rough edges, so keep that in mind!

This approach really doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. The model has to output the entire transcript token by token, instead of simply adding it to the context window...<p>A more interesting idea would be a browser extension that lets you open a chat window from within YouTube, letting you ask it questions about certain parts of the transcript with full context in the system prompt.

How is it supposed to work? When I open this, I just see a prompt that says &quot;Get the full transcription of any Youtube video, fast. Studies suggest that reading leads to better retention of complex information compared to video watching. Only English videos currently.&quot;<p>I tried pasting the URL of a YouTube video and I get the message &quot;I&#x27;m unable to access the video directly, as the tool needed for that is disabled. However, if you&#x27;d like, you can summarize the video or let me know how I can assist with it!&quot;

It does not work with long form conversations like podcasts.<p>&quot;I was unable to retrieve the transcript for this video due to its large size.&quot;

I get what this is doing, but calling it &quot;chat with a transcript&quot; is weird. Like, documents and videos don&#x27;t chat. We chat with a bot who has seen the document&#x2F;video.

I don&#x27;t know if everyone has access to it (might just be yt premium), but many videos have an &quot;ask gemini about this video&quot; button, where you can directly ask questions about the video.

I’d love this but from the yt home page and search results page. That would let me ask chatgpt if the video really contains the info its thumbnail&#x2F;title suggest it does without having to leave the current browser tab.<p>I’ve done this by manually copy&#x2F;pasting a yt transcript into chatgpt (and later streamlining it into a bash function), and it was quite effective, allowing me to dodge a couple of click bait time wasters. (videos that <i>looked</i> important but really were just fluffing up unimportant nonsense).

Very nice. I made a thing in Python which summarizes a YouTube transcript in bullet points. Never thought about asking it questions, that&#x27;s a great idea!<p>I just run yt-dlp to fetch the transcript and shove it in the GPT prompt. (I think also have a few lines to remove the timestamps, although arguably those would be useful to keep.)<p>My prompt is &quot;{transcript} Please summarize the above in bullet points&quot;<p>The trick was splitting it up into overlapping chunks so it fits in the context size. (And then summarizing your summary because it ends up too long cause you had so many chunks!)<p>These days that&#x27;s not so important, usually you can shove an entire book in! (Unless you&#x27;re using a local model, which still have small context sizes, work pretty well for summarization.)

I&#x27;ve been using Voxscript [0] for a while, after comparing the two I think voxscript is better, gives longer more detailed summaries, TexTube just seems to give a very brief impersonal overview. Easy to try both and see which you prefer.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;g-g24EzkDta-voxscript" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;g&#x2F;g-g24EzkDta-voxscript</a>

is this better than the Youtube-generated transcript &#x2F; captions you&#x27;d get from something like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Kakulukian&#x2F;youtube-transcript">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Kakulukian&#x2F;youtube-transcript</a>?

I pasted a video link and it says “Not Found”. Absolutely not the best first impression.

What does it mean by chat with a transcript?<p>I.e. what are the kind of things I can ask and get value from?

allofus.ai already congregates all of the thinking of any creator on YouTube into a single mental model and allows you to interact with their synthetic self.

When I try it it just says &quot;Not found&quot;

Does it not break YT ToS?

The most interesting thing about this is that OpenAI apparently does not own chatgpt.com domain.

Seems like fishing with hand grenades to me. I just download the subs and grep that.

Nice, hallucinate a text document about video content. Next is hallucinating a video from a text document hallucinated from a video?

Awesome work, OP! I really believe we’ll soon be able to get a full four-year education just from YouTube. The challenge right now is sifting through the infotainment that the algorithms tend to push.<p>This is actually what inspired us to create Lectura: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lectura.xyz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lectura.xyz&#x2F;</a><p>We’ve added features that promote curiosity and deeper learning, like ELI5 explanations, suggested queries based on transcripts, quizzes to track retention, and more.<p>If you’re interested in joining us to build out the platform, feel free to reach out at neil at lectura dot xyz