[HN Gopher] Show HN: Summary Cat, a YouTube Video Summary Generator
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Show HN: Summary Cat, a YouTube Video Summary Generator
Hello HN! Please check out Summary Cat
(https://www.summarycat.com). It uses OpenAI's GPT-3.5 to summarize
YouTube transcripts. Please note that it only works for
- *English* videos. - videos that are not too long in length.
I'd appreciate any feedbacks, criticisms, or feature requests!! You
can also find my contact info in my profile. Thank you in advance.
------------Technical Details--------------- Tech Stack
- Frontend: HTML/CSS - Backend: Python/Flask APIs:
- For grabbing YouTube's transcripts: I used youtube-transcript-api
(https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/) - For
summarizing the transcripts: I used OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo-16k:
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/gpt. - I used GPT-3.5
because GPT-4 is quite a lot more expensive (roughly 10X). My
Prompt (Super Simple!) - "please summarize the
following text into a few paragraphs:" + the full transcript.
Thoughts about GPT-4 vs GPT-3.5-Turbo-16k for Summary Cat
- GPT-4 was 20% better for "summary quality" - GPT-4 feels
50% faster - However, GPT-4 is about 10X as expensive as
GPT-3.5 - Winner: GPT-3.5-Turbo-16k
Author : bing_dai
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-09-22 20:24 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.summarycat.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.summarycat.com)
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Not bad - fed in one of my videos and it's surprisingly readable.
| Are you using a particular prompt? Would you be willing to share
| it?
| bing_dai wrote:
| More than happy to share!
|
| ----------- My prompt is super simple. It is "please summarize
| the following text into a few paragraphs:" + the full
| transcript. -----------
|
| Seriously that's it!
| StevenNunez wrote:
| Oh boy, wait until the "Prompt Engineers" get a hold of this
| one.
| bing_dai wrote:
| Sorry, could you please explain what you mean? I am not
| really quite getting it. What might happen if a Prompt
| Engineer get a hold of it?
| varispeed wrote:
| The off centre spinning wheel bothers me too much.
|
| That's so evil. Please correct the alignment!
| [deleted]
| corobo wrote:
| Just used this to clear out my watch later list without having to
| watch anything. Nice!
|
| Only note I have at this time is that it seemed to time out or
| hang or something on a long video (>2h) -- I'm guessing that
| there might be limitations to how much transcript you can chuck
| into GPT, it might be worth throwing an error of some sort in
| that scenario rather than the forever load
|
| E: Seen you've asked for an example to the other person
| mentioning this. In my case it was this video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFL6qRIJZ_Y
| bing_dai wrote:
| I think your suspicion might be correct: long videos exceeds
| GPT token limitation (16,385 tokens in my case of
| GPT-3.5-turbo-16k).
|
| Thanks for your suggestion about how to address it.
| pvg wrote:
| 'Clean up your watch later list" is a neat use case that
| might be worth supporting directly in some way.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| It should always append the message "This could have been a blog
| post" to everything it summarizes.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Is GPT-4 performance better enough paying would be worth it?
|
| Edit: Thank you!
| bing_dai wrote:
| Hello, GPT-4 is not worth it in my experience so far!
|
| I would say, GPT-4 is - 20% better at "summary quality" - feels
| 50% faster - BUT, 10X as expensive.
|
| So using GPT-3.5 was the right choice for me at this point.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Totally missed what this was supposed to do and tried to get a
| summary of a video discussing some music with captions. Got back
| garbage. Thought it might process the text from the frames.
| Shrug. Good idea for the use case you intended tho!
| [deleted]
| twayt wrote:
| Also try www.askYouTube.ai for q&a across multiple videos!
| mac_cain13 wrote:
| Pretty nice! Very useful idea, especially for videos on my
| watchlist I never get to because I feel they're too long.
|
| Would love if I could ask follow up questions. Would be awesome
| to ask "Is X also explained?" and get a little summary back with
| the timestamp so I can jump to that point in the video.
|
| Also it feels a bit slow and doesn't really give feedback whether
| it's making progress. That would be a good UX improvement.
| joelkesler wrote:
| Nice!
|
| For those interested in comparing, https://www.summarize.tech/
| also builds summaries from YouTube videos but includes an
| overview, then a summary of each 5 min segment
| [deleted]
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Holy wow, this is FAST. I wonder if both videos I used were
| cached. How do they do it so fast?
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Plugged in this meme video and it gave me the "As a AI I
| can't...": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlZzftmtGJY
|
| Are you using celery for your async workers? Cool project!
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Interesting, very cool!
|
| However, how does it do on videos where there's not a lot of
| speaking? Any plans to do _actual_ video (image) processing?
| bing_dai wrote:
| Thanks for the question... Any sample videos you are thinking
| of?
|
| Summary Cat doesn't work for videos where there's not a lot of
| speaking. I am hoping to build a bit more on text-rich videos
| first, so I do not plan to do actual video (image) processing
| any time soon.
|
| I will keep that in mind!!
| johntiger1 wrote:
| I am thinking about music videos, where the lyrics don't
| describe the video necessarily. For instance, I am curious
| about what exactly is the story in this music video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pruKV1chnHA&ab_channel
| flir wrote:
| It's hanging for everything I try.
|
| I suggest a progress bar rather than a spinny thingy. Give the
| user some sense that a conclusion is on the horizon.
|
| From my own experiments, I think you'll get better summaries with
| a prompt like "This is a transcription of a youtube video. Please
| etc etc etc". Context seems to help.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I tried to do something similar, but I could only get transcripts
| for videos with transcript files attached, which isnt a huge
| number of videos. How did you get around this?
| bing_dai wrote:
| Hi, I used this Python library
| (https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/) to get
| transcripts. It works great.
| crtasm wrote:
| Giving it either a long (2.5hr) video, or a non-youtube URL (e.g.
| an invidious link) appears to leave it spinning forever - no
| error message.
| bing_dai wrote:
| If you don't mind, could you share an example of such long
| video? I'd love to debug it.
|
| As for non-Youtube URL: I indeed do not handle that error right
| now :D. Thanks so much for bringing it up!
| crtasm wrote:
| This is the 2.5hr video i tried:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGIGA8taN-M
|
| This 1hr video works (but I note you don't seem to be caching
| the output?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s9fpFPAC94
| TuringNYC wrote:
| This <1hr video seemed to crash the system:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV949D8AUKU
| crtasm wrote:
| That one works for me.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| Seems to be an arms race between youtube forcing creators to make
| videos 8 mins long min to be able to get mid roll ads and people
| coming up with ways to summarize the transcript.
|
| Idea for the future: Use the summarize to re-cut the videos to
| the most important parts. Like a super to the point tiktok style
| video that is nothing but dopamine being injected into your
| veins. There seems to already be "auto podcast clipper ai agents"
| out there but nothing for consumers to use. those are more video
| editor adjacent. If anyone wants to work on something like this,
| lemme know.
| bing_dai wrote:
| I agree that this is happening " an arms race between youtube
| forcing creators to make videos 8 mins long min to be able to
| get mid roll ads and people coming up with ways to summarize
| the transcript." Along the same line: I have been thinking
| about how my Summary Cat might mean for the content creators.
| How would it impact their income?
|
| Your "use the summarizer to re-cut the videos" is fantastic!
| [deleted]
| vitalsea wrote:
| How many tokens do you allow per session? I've been thinking
| about creating a similar app, but I'm a little bit concerned
| about the unintended costs.
| bing_dai wrote:
| Hello! Thanks for the question. I do not myself restrict
| tokens/session. The model I am using GPT-3.5-Turbo-16k
| (https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-3-5), allows max
| 16,385 tokens in total per input/output.
|
| So far, I found that each ~10 minute video uses around 1000
| tokens. It costs me about 3 cents to summarize, which is not
| too bad as I don't have many users, and users haven't been
| requesting summaries for super long videos yet.
|
| If this sites gets a lot of interest, I might start restricting
| something :)..
|
| GPT 3.5 Pricing: https://openai.com/pricing
| zthomas wrote:
| Looks great, it gave a quick response. Are you putting the whole
| transcript in context? Have you encountered issues with
| transcripts that are too large?
| kawsper wrote:
| I tested it with two videos, the first one it does the summary
| quite well: https://youtu.be/Cy-NgpRN1FU, I love how it mentions
| the dogs name is Ernie, that made me smile :)
|
| But in the second video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBFyvOV7fz8 the app keeps
| mentioning things like: "The text discusses...", but the content
| is not a text, it's a video.
|
| Really cool app, it's really quick too!
| codetrotter wrote:
| > the content is not a text, it's a video
|
| To be fair, OP did say that they summarise the YouTube
| transcript. So OpenAI GPT receives text.
|
| But if OP didn't do so already maybe they could start the
| OpenAI system prompt with something like "you are summarising
| transcripts of YouTube videos" and possibly it could help to
| make the summary refer to the material as video.
| zthomas wrote:
| Would be nice to add a textarea to give it more specific
| instructions or to change the summarization prompt.
| epalzm wrote:
| It hang on non - english video. I tried this one:
| https://youtu.be/B4kRwlHTcLM?si=3kp3pvQ4M4l6eRTT Otherwise,
| brilliant
| badrequest wrote:
| It literally says in the original post that it only works for
| English videos.
| bing_dai wrote:
| You are right. The site doesn't handle non-English videos, but
| that is on the roadmap. Thanks so much!
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(page generated 2023-09-22 23:00 UTC)