Using ChatGPT to summarize YouTube Transcripts

Like everyone else I’ve been playing with ChatGPT – a natural language chatbot that can do some pretty amazing things when it comes to summarizing text and even writing computer code.

I thought it might be fun to see if it could make summaries of my YouTube videos. ChatGPT can’t yet transcribe directly from a video but you can give it the transcript that YouTube generates automatically.

Here’s what it came up with for my recent video on Mastodon:

Pretty good right? And this is with all of the errors that YouTube automatic subtitles introduce into the text. While not perfect it’s definitely a good start and certainly better than a writing prompt.

I was also curious how it would do with a product review. Here’s what it came up with for the Kindle Scribe:

Here it missed some of my complaints that largely centered on the software-side of the experience mainly how its handwritten notes in books can’t be written on the pages of the book itself, and some of the shortfalls with note synchronization across platforms. But again, pretty good start with nothing but a YouTube transcript to work with.

The explosion of these consumer-facing AI apps we’ve seen over the last few months is stunning.