You Can Use AI to Summarize YouTube Videos and Boring Emails
In its current form, AI is not a reliable source of information. But while AI bots like ChatGPT have been known to hallucinate and offer false information, there’s one task it really excels at: summing up.
This advantage comes from how large language models (LLMs) work: they are trained to compress huge amounts of data and guess which parts are the best. There are many tools available now that can help you summarize everything from YouTube videos to emails. And of course, you can easily summarize long articles or lengthy PDFs with tools like Wordtune Read .
Automatically summarize YouTube videos
I love watching long-winded explainer videos on YouTube as much as any other guy, but I also enjoy using the Glairty extension to convert those videos into quick explainers. Once you install and activate the extension, it will automatically generate a YouTube video summary by copying the entire transcript and running it through ChatGPT, provided the video has a solid transcript to work with.
Processing takes place in the background, but requires some configuration. First you will need to login to the OpenAI website and you may need to authenticate your login periodically. If this annoys you too much, I suggest you sign up for an OpenAI “Pay As You Go” account to get a set of API keys. Set a limit of $5 per month and add the API to your Glarity settings so you don’t have to deal with annoying login requests.
As mentioned, Glarity won’t work for all videos. ChatGPT itself has a 5,000 word limit, so you won’t be able to get a YouTube four-hour breakdown summary. I have found that this works best for explainer videos that are 5 to 15 minutes long. For example, I got a pretty good idea of why you shouldn’t buy a new car now , and it saved me six minutes of watching time.
By default, Glarity provides brief summaries, but you can customize the response by going to the extension’s settings. You can ask him to provide you with bullet points, a general gist, or a detailed summary by editing the hint.
If you want to use the ChatGPT interface (which allows you to save conversations and ask follow-up questions), try Glasp’s YouTube Summary with ChatGPT extension. Requires a manual approach to the entire YouTube summary.
After opening the video, click the new OpenAI button that appears. This will open ChatGPT in a new tab and the command and transcript will be pasted into the text field. Click the text area, then click “Submit” and you will immediately see the detailed summary. In my experience, Glasp generates a more detailed summary by default than Glarity. And, of course, you can customize the team before sending it, such as asking for a summary of the transcript in just a few sentences.
Sum up long emails you never planned to read
If AI can help us get closer to mailbox zero, all this effort to change humanity will be worth it. It’s already starting to happen: Google is still far from bringing any meaningful AI features to Gmail, but Shortwave is already there.
Shortwave is a Google Inbox inspired app that’s even better than Gmail on the web. They added one-click AI summaries with ChatGPT, which works on both mobile apps and browsers. In the browser, simply click the “Summary” button on the top toolbar to create a quick summary of any email. This feature is available for free while it is in beta.
While Shortwave is great for creating accurate summaries of long or boring emails, we recommend that you don’t use it with anything particularly important, especially work messages. After all, this is a generative language model, and sometimes it can gloss over things that might be really important.