youtube-transcript

YouTube Transcript

Fetch the transcript of a YouTube video and respond appropriately based on what the user asked for.

Steps

1. Ensure Homebrew and yt-dlp are installed

if ! command -v brew &> /dev/null; then
    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
fi
if ! command -v yt-dlp &> /dev/null; then
    brew install yt-dlp
fi

2. Download the transcript to a temp SRT file:

TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --sub-format srt --skip-download "$URL" -o "$TMPDIR/transcript"

Where $URL is the YouTube URL provided by the user.

3. Extract clean text from the SRT file:

import re, glob

srt_files = glob.glob(f"{tmpdir}/*.srt")
if not srt_files:
    print("ERROR: No transcript found")
    exit(1)

with open(srt_files[0], 'r') as f:
    content = f.read()

blocks = re.split(r'\n\n+', content.strip())
lines = []
for block in blocks:
    parts = block.strip().split('\n')
    for part in parts[2:]:
        text = re.sub(r'<[^>]+>', '', part).strip()
        if text:
            lines.append(text)

deduped = []
for line in lines:
    if not deduped or line != deduped[-1]:
        deduped.append(line)

print(' '.join(deduped))

Save the output to $TMPDIR/transcript.txt.

4. Read the transcript text and respond based on what the user asked for:

User intent	Response
Just a URL, no other instructions	Display the full transcript text
"summarize" or similar	Write a concise summary
"extract X" or specific question	Pull out the relevant information
Any other instruction	Follow it using the transcript as source material

If yt-dlp reports no subtitles available, tell the user the video has no transcript.

Example invocations

• /youtube-transcript:youtube-transcript https://youtube.com/watch?v=abc123 → display full transcript
• /youtube-transcript:youtube-transcript https://youtube.com/watch?v=abc123 summarize → summary
• /youtube-transcript:youtube-transcript https://youtube.com/watch?v=abc123 what does it say about sleep? → extract relevant section