YouTube Video Summarizer

🚀 YouTube Summarizer: AI YouTube Video Summarizer API

Turn any YouTube video into a structured AI summary: a one-line short summary, a detailed long summary, key takeaways, actionable insights, topic categories and the overall sentiment, plus the video's title, channel and length. The YouTube Summarizer works as a YouTube video summarizer API: paste one or many links, and get each summary as JSON, CSV or Excel, ready for a newsletter, a research database or an AI agent. No API key, no login.

🎯 Use Cases

• Summarize YouTube videos in bulk: paste a list of lectures, podcasts or webinars and get a YouTube summary of each one instead of watching hours of video.
• Research and learning notes: turn talks, courses and conference videos into key takeaways you can search, tag and share.
• Content curation and newsletters: write "what to watch this week" digests from the short summaries and categories.
• Competitor and market monitoring: summarize competitors' product videos, earnings calls or interviews and track the sentiment over time.
• AI and LLM pipelines: feed structured YouTube summary AI output (takeaways, insights, categories) into your own agents, RAG indexes or dashboards.

✨ Features

• Structured AI summary: shortSummary (1–2 sentences), longSummary (a full paragraph), keyTakeaways, actionableInsights, categories and sentiment (positive, neutral or negative).
• Video details: title, channel name, duration in seconds and the language of the captions the summary was written from.
• Any link format: watch links, youtu.be short links, Shorts and live links, or bare 11-character video IDs.
• Long videos work: a 2.4-hour podcast was summarized in one run.
• Videos in other languages: the summary is written from the video's own captions (tested on Spanish).
• Clear reasons: a video without captions, a private video or a link that isn't a YouTube video is named in the final status, not charged.
• No duplicates: the same video listed twice is summarized once.

🛠️ How It Works

1. Paste YouTube video URLs: one per line (empty = an example video).
2. Run the YouTube Summarizer: it reads each video's captions and writes the summary with AI.
3. Download the summaries, or read them through the Apify API.

⚙️ Input

Field	What it does
Video URLs (videoUrls)	YouTube links to summarize: watch, youtu.be, Shorts or live links, or video IDs. One per line.

{
    "videoUrls": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSHmygPQukQ",
        "https://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc"
    ]
}

💰 Pricing

Pay only for the summaries you get. No monthly rental, and videos without captions are not charged.

Event	Price	What you get
Video	$0.05 per summarized video ($50.00 per 1,000)	One video summary with all fields below

Examples: 1 video = $0.05 · a 20-video course = $1.00 · 100 podcast episodes = $5.00.

📊 Sample Output Data

{
    "id": "wSHmygPQukQ",
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSHmygPQukQ",
    "title": "Majorana 1 Explained: The Path to a Million Qubits",
    "channelName": "Microsoft",
    "durationSeconds": 743,
    "transcriptLanguage": "en",
    "shortSummary": "Microsoft's quantum computing project has successfully observed and controlled the Majorana particle, paving the way for scalable quantum computers using topological qubits capable of solving previously unsolvable problems.",
    "longSummary": "In a groundbreaking development, Microsoft's quantum computing team has made significant progress by observing and controlling the elusive Majorana particle. This advancement allows for the creation of topological qubits, which offer greater stability, error resistance, and miniaturization potential. …",
    "keyTakeaways": [
        "Microsoft's team has observed and controlled the Majorana particle, enabling new quantum computing architectures.",
        "Topological qubits created from Majorana particles can dramatically scale quantum processors to millions of qubits.",
        "This project represents a culmination of 17 years of research, marking a significant leap towards practical quantum computing applications."
    ],
    "actionableInsights": [
        "Explore potential applications of quantum computing in your industry, especially related to material science and AI.",
        "Invest in learning about quantum computing to stay ahead in technology innovation and programming skills."
    ],
    "categories": ["Quantum Computing", "Technology", "Science", "Innovation"],
    "sentiment": "positive"
}

transcriptLanguage is the language of the captions the summary was written from. sentiment is the overall tone of the video. actionableInsights can be short or empty for entertainment videos such as music.

🔁 Schedule and Integrate

To summarize new videos from the channels you follow, run the YouTube Channel Videos Scraper on a daily Apify Schedule and pass the new links to the YouTube Summarizer. Send the summaries to Google Sheets, Notion, Slack, Zapier, Make, n8n or your own webhook through Apify integrations.

🤖 Use with AI Agents (MCP)

The YouTube Summarizer works as a tool in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients through the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com), so an agent can summarize a YouTube video on request. An agent can call it with:

{ "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc"] }

❓ FAQ

How do I summarize a YouTube video? Paste the video link into Video URLs and run the YouTube Summarizer. A few seconds later you get the short and long summary, key takeaways, insights, categories and sentiment for that video. Add more links to summarize YouTube videos in bulk.

Does YouTube have an official API for summaries or transcripts? The YouTube Data API lists videos, channels and comments, but it does not return transcripts for other people's videos and has no summary feature. This YouTube summarizer API reads the public captions and writes the summary for you, with no API key, quota or OAuth setup.

Which videos can be summarized? Any public video with captions, including auto-generated ones: talks, podcasts, lectures, tutorials and interviews, short or several hours long. Videos without any captions, private videos and members-only videos can't be summarized; the final status lists them and they are not charged.

What language is the summary in? The summary is written in English, from the video's own captions. A Spanish talk, for example, comes back as an English summary. transcriptLanguage shows which caption language was used.

Is this a YouTube transcript summarizer, or do I get the transcript too? You get the summary. If you need the full transcript with timestamps, use the YouTube Transcript Scraper.

Do I need a YouTube account? No. Only public video pages are read.

🔗 Related Scrapers

• YouTube Transcript Scraper: the full timestamped transcript of each video.
• YouTube Channel Videos Scraper: every video of a channel, to feed new uploads into the summarizer.
• YouTube Comments Scraper: what viewers say about the videos you summarize.
• YouTube Video Details Scraper: views, likes and publish dates for the same videos.
• YouTube Shorts Scraper: the Shorts a channel publishes.