Do you want to get to the gist of a long YouTube video without watching the whole thing?
You get a lot of informative content from great YouTube content to support your research, homework, or blog. But watching an entire 1-hour video and taking notes manually can be time-consuming and tedious.
Thankfully, with AI, such manual and tedious work is no longer necessary. Today, you can get summaries from YouTube videos instantly!
This post is all about how to summarize key points from YouTube videos (both manually and with AI). And we’ll also look at the best YouTube summarizer tools to help you.
Let’s go.
Why Summarize YouTube Videos?
There are many reasons why you’d want to summarize YouTube videos.
- Save time: By getting the main points of a video quickly, you save yourself time. You don’t have to spend hours watching and taking notes manually.
- Easy to understand: Videos can sometimes be long-winded or difficult to follow. Summaries give you a clear and concise overview of the content.
- Better retention: Studies show that summarization helps with information retention. So if you want to remember the key points of a video, summarizing it is your best bet.
- Convenient: You can access summaries anytime and anywhere. They’re easier to read and digest compared to watching a video, especially for those with busy schedules.
Who Needs to Summarize YouTube Videos?
Anyone who consumes educational or informative content on YouTube can benefit from summarizing videos. This includes:
- Students: Summarizing a video is an efficient way to study and understand complex topics.
- Researchers: Video summaries give you a quick overview of relevant information, saving you time in your research process.
- Bloggers and Content Creators: You can use video summaries as a reference for your blog posts or videos, making it easier to create quality content. You can also summarize videos to repurpose them and make blog posts and social media content.
Now, let’s get to how you should summarize YouTube videos.
How to Summarize YouTube Videos
There are two main methods you can use to summarize YouTube videos: manually and automatically using AI tools. Let’s take a look at both options.
Manually Summarizing YouTube Videos
Manually summarizing YouTube videos involves watching the entire video and taking notes on the key points. This method requires a lot of time and effort, but it gives you complete control over what information to include in your summary.
To manually summarize a YouTube video, follow these steps:
- Watch the whole video carefully while taking notes of important information
- Use your arrow tools or manually move the video back and forth to listen to key points again
- Organize your notes based on the video’s structure, such as main points, subtopics, and supporting evidence. Also, don’t hesitate to just jot down interesting points and add your own insights in the process
- Use bullet points or numbered lists to present your summary in a clear and concise manner
- Read the comments for more insights on the video and its content
Automatically Summarizing YouTube Videos (With AI)
AI tools can help you summarize YouTube videos instantly with just a few clicks.
Typically, you’d have to download a good summarization extension for your Chrome browser and click on the extension or widget to start the process.
Let’s look at a few of the best tools for summarizing YouTube videos using AI:
- Summarize.tech: This free Chrome Extension works with ChatGPT to generate simple key points from a YouTube video. It’s fairly reliable and the quality of its summaries varies from video to video. You can generate parapgrahs, bullet points, article, or even translate the whole video.
- Wordtune: Wordtune’s Chrome extension will automatically extract the closed captions from a video and generate the key points from it.
- QuillBot: This AI-powered writing assistant can also help summarize YouTube videos. Simply copy and paste the video’s transcript into Wordtune, and it will automatically generate a summary for you.
There are many more powerful AI tools you can use to generate summaries of YouTube summaries. And we’ll cover them in another post in great detail.
Conclusion
Summarizing YouTube videos is a great way to save time, better understand complex topics, and improve information retention.
With both manual and automatic options available, you can easily choose the best method that suits your needs. So the next time you come across a long YouTube video, don’t hesitate to summarize it and get the information you need quickly and efficiently! Keep learning, keep summarizing.
