Question 1

Is YouTubeAI completely free to use?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every feature on YouTubeAI is free to use without a paid plan. You can summarize videos of any length, in any of the supported languages, as a guest or with a free account. Signing in (with email/password or Google) is optional. It only adds personal touches — saving past summaries to your library, syncing language preference across devices — and it never unlocks paid-only behavior because there is no paid tier. We may introduce optional paid features in the future (e.g. team workspaces, API access). The current free tool will remain free.

Question 2

How accurate are the summaries?

Accepted Answer

Accuracy depends on two stages: getting the spoken text, and summarizing it. For the transcript, we prefer YouTube's official captions when they exist. These are generally very accurate (creator-uploaded) or good (auto-captioned). When captions aren't available, we fall back to Whisper transcription on the downloaded audio. Whisper is excellent for clear single-speaker or interview audio; it can struggle with heavy crosstalk, noisy environments, or rare proper nouns. For the summary, we use a Claude model from Anthropic via our gateway. Summaries are reliable for structure (topics, claims, takeaways, the order the conversation moved through) but they're paraphrases — don't quote them. If you're going to cite a fact, jump back to the cited timestamp and confirm.

Question 3

What does YouTubeAI do with my videos and summaries?

Accepted Answer

We process the YouTube URL you submit, the transcript we fetch or generate from it, and the resulting summary. Here's what happens to each: - The URL is logged for debugging and abuse prevention. It's not shared. - The transcript is held in memory long enough to generate the summary, then discarded. We don't archive transcripts. - The summary is shown to you immediately. If you're signed in and saving to your library, we store the summary text against your account. If you're not signed in, we don't keep it after the response. We do not train models on your inputs. The summary itself is generated by Claude (Anthropic) via our gateway, configured to not retain content. For the full policy — including cookie use, analytics, and your access/deletion rights — see the Privacy Policy.

Question 4

Is there a length limit on videos I can summarize?

Accepted Answer

There's no hard maximum. We've successfully summarized videos over 4 hours. In practice, two things vary with length: - Time to first summary — for a video with captions available, length barely matters; the response is usually under 30 seconds even for multi-hour content. For videos that need Whisper transcription, processing time scales with the audio length, so a 3-hour podcast may take a few minutes the first time. - Summary depth — for very long videos, we structure the summary by topic rather than chronologically, so a 4-hour podcast and a 1-hour interview get the same kind of scannable outline rather than a flat narrative. Very short videos (under ~2 minutes) are technically supported but often not worth summarizing — you can just watch them.

Question 5

Can I summarize private or unlisted YouTube videos?

Accepted Answer

Public and unlisted videos work. Truly private videos (set to "private" in YouTube Studio, viewable only to you and people you've invited) do not work, because our service can't authenticate as your YouTube account to access them. Unlisted videos — the kind with a shareable link that don't appear in search — are accessible via direct URL, so we can fetch them. Just paste the unlisted URL the same way you would a public one. If you have a private video you need to summarize, the workaround is to set it to unlisted briefly while running the summary, then back to private. We don't store the video content; we only need the URL during the summarization request.

Question 6

What languages are supported for video summarization?

Accepted Answer

The transcription stage works in 30+ languages — anything Whisper or YouTube captions support. That covers the major European, East Asian, South Asian, Arabic, and Slavic language families. You can also choose a different output language for the summary itself. The picker in the summary view lets you pick from the supported languages, so a Japanese-language podcast can produce an English summary, or a Spanish keynote can produce a Mandarin summary. Two practical caveats: very low-resource languages may have noticeably weaker transcription quality, and code-switching (rapid alternation between two languages mid-sentence) can confuse the auto-detection. If a result looks off, try selecting the source language explicitly.

Question 7

Can I save or export summaries?

Accepted Answer

Yes. From any summary view you can: - Copy the full summary text to your clipboard with one click. The output is plain markdown, which pastes cleanly into Notion, Obsidian, Apple Notes, Google Docs, or any other note tool. - Re-open a past summary. Signed-in users have a personal library of past summaries accessible from their account. - Share a direct link to the summary view (the link includes the original video URL, so anyone with the link can re-render the summary). PDF export and a markdown-file download are on the roadmap. For now, copy-to-clipboard handles most use cases — the markdown formatting is preserved, so headings and bullet lists land correctly in any markdown-aware editor.

Question 8

Why can't I get a summary for this video?

Accepted Answer

A few reasons a summary might fail: - The video is private. Only public and unlisted videos are accessible to our service. - The video is age-restricted, region-locked, or removed. YouTube blocks our service from reaching it the same way it would block any signed-out viewer. - The video is a YouTube Live stream still in progress. Wait until the stream ends and the recording is published; then it works like any other video. - The video has no captions and the audio is too noisy or too musical for transcription. Music videos, ambient/looping content, and very-low-quality recordings can produce empty or garbled transcripts. - You hit a temporary rate limit (rare, but possible if you've been making many requests in a short period). If the problem doesn't match any of these, it may be a transient issue on our side — wait a minute and try again. If it persists, email us at support@youtubeai.chat with the video URL.

Frequently asked questions

Pricing & access

Is YouTubeAI completely free to use?

Accuracy & quality