Summarise YouTube video

Shortcuts can call other shortcuts as building blocks, and that’s the trick behind this one. A separate shortcut does the actual talking to OpenAI, while this one just hands off the work. Paste in a YouTube link and it grabs the video’s transcript, passes the text along, and hands back a summary instead of you sitting through the whole clip.

How it works

Feed it a YouTube link, from the Share Sheet or pasted directly, and the shortcut fetches the transcript through youtube-transcript.io, a free transcript service, rather than trying to transcribe the audio itself. It only processes one language track per video, so a clip with several dubbed audio options gets summarised from whichever transcript that service returns first. Once it has the text, the shortcut passes it to Ask ChatGPT, a separate shortcut from the same author that handles the actual OpenAI connection, and returns whatever summary comes back. Live and currently-streaming videos work too, a capability added after the shortcut’s first release.

Apps you need

• Shortcuts: built into iOS, nothing extra to install for this part.
• Ask ChatGPT: the author’s companion shortcut that actually calls OpenAI. This shortcut hands the transcript off to it and pulls in whatever version is current each run.
• An OpenAI API key: stored the first time you run it, since summarising depends on that API connection rather than the ChatGPT app.

Adding it to your iPhone

1. Tap Add Shortcut on this page to open it in the Shortcuts app.
2. Scroll the preview to the bottom and tap Add Shortcut to confirm.
3. Install the Ask ChatGPT shortcut as well if you don’t already have it, since the summary step calls into it.
4. Run it once so it can walk you through the API key prompt.

First-run setup

The first run connects the shortcut to OpenAI: paste an API key when it asks, and it stores that key so you’re not repeating the step on every use. Version 18 reworked this prompt to be less fiddly and improved how failed API calls are handled, so a bad request restarts the setup flow instead of leaving you stuck mid-summary. The shortcut also checks for its own updates on every run, which is how it stays pointed at the newest Ask ChatGPT release without you doing anything.

Using it day-to-day

Share a YouTube link straight from the YouTube app or Safari, or open the shortcut on its own and paste a link when there’s nothing to grab from the Share Sheet, an option added specifically for that case. It fetches the transcript, sends it off, and returns a plain-text summary you can read in seconds rather than scrubbing through a twenty-minute video looking for the point. Because it only reads one transcript track, foreign-language uploads with multiple caption options can occasionally summarise a track you weren’t expecting.

Quick answers

Does this work on livestreams?

Live and already-streamed videos have been supported since an update not long after launch, so you’re not limited to finished, fully-processed uploads.

Do I need a ChatGPT Plus subscription for this?

No subscription required. The summarising happens through Ask ChatGPT’s OpenAI API connection, which is billed per request rather than a flat monthly fee, so light use costs very little.

What happens if YouTube doesn’t have a transcript for the video?

Then there’s nothing for youtube-transcript.io to pull, and the shortcut has no text to hand off. Most uploads carry auto-generated captions, but a handful of videos genuinely ship without any transcript track at all.

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