youtube-watcher-7_skill

Overview

This skill fetches and reads transcripts from YouTube videos to enable fast summarization, question answering, and information extraction. It is designed to produce plain-text transcripts that can be summarized or searched programmatically. Use it when you need reliable access to a video's spoken content without watching the video.

How this skill works

The skill uses yt-dlp to download or extract subtitle tracks (closed captions or auto-generated subtitles) from a YouTube URL and outputs a plain-text transcript. It expects a local provider process (OpenClawProvider) to be available for integration in the environment. Once a transcript is produced you can run summarization, keyword search, or QA routines against the text.

When to use it

• Summarizing long videos into concise notes or bullet points.
• Answering specific questions about a video’s content without viewing it.
• Extracting quotes, timestamps, or topic sections from lectures or talks.
• Indexing spoken content for search or archival purposes.
• Preparing show notes or captions for accessibility and reuse.

Best practices

• Ensure yt-dlp is installed and available on the system PATH before running the script.
• Confirm OpenClawProvider is running when integrating the skill into automated pipelines.
• Verify that the target video has closed captions or auto-generated subtitles; otherwise the script will fail.
• Post-process transcripts to remove timestamps or noise before running summarization models.
• Split very long transcripts into chunks before feeding them to models with context-size limits.

Example use cases

• Run the transcript tool on a recorded conference talk to create a 3-5 sentence summary for email distribution.
• Extract and index Q&A segments from panel discussions so users can search by topic.
• Find and copy exact quotes from interviews by searching the downloaded transcript text.
• Produce study notes from recorded lectures by extracting key points and timestamps.
• Check a video transcript for mentions of specific product names or topics for compliance review.