YT Summaries

I save a lot of YouTube videos to watch later, but “later” rarely comes. Most of the time I just want the key ideas without sitting through a 40-minute video. So I built an automation that does the watching for me.

Every day at 10am, the workflow picks up whatever’s in a designated YouTube playlist, pulls the transcript for each video via RapidAPI, and sends it to an LLM to generate a concise summary with key takeaways. The summaries get packaged into a clean HTML email and delivered to my inbox. Once processed, each video is removed from the playlist automatically.

The error handling skips videos that don’t have transcripts available instead of breaking the whole run. The LLM prompt is tuned to produce structured output — a narrative summary followed by numbered takeaways — so every email reads consistently.

Built with n8n, YouTube Data API, RapidAPI Transcripts, Google Gemini, and Gmail.