YouTube Caption Summaries

This Python tool retrieves the captions from a YouTube video, and then uses the OpenAI Chat API to summarize them.

Prerequisites

Python 3.8+
An API key for the OpenAI Chat API
A config.yaml file with your OpenAI Chat API key in the following format:

openai:
  key: "your_openai_key"

Installation

Clone this repository and navigate into it:

git clone https://github.com/j-jayes/yt-caption-summaries.git
cd yt-caption-summaries

Create a virtual environment and activate it:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Windows, use `.venv\Scripts\activate`

Install the required packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

You can run the script with a YouTube video URL as follows:

python -m src.main "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"

The summary of the video's captions will be saved in a .txt file in the summaries folder.

The tool tries to fetch English captions by default. If you want to specify another language for the original captions, you can do so with the --lang flag. For example, to fetch Swedish captions and then translate them into English:

python -m src.main "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP-ocdDPRlk" --lang "sv"

Flow chart

graph TB
  A[Input YouTube URL] --> B[YouTube Data API: Get Transcript]
  B --> C[OpenAI API: Summarize Transcript]
  C --> D[Save Summary to Text File]

Contributing

Please feel free to fork this repository and submit pull requests. To install development dependencies, run pip install -r requirements_dev.txt.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.