Overview

Retrieve transcripts and metadata from YouTube videos via TranscriptAPI.com for summarization, analysis, quoting, and translation.

Key Advantages

1.Purpose-built for YouTube: accepts full, short, shorts URLs, and bare video IDs.

2.Supports both text and structured JSON formats, with optional timestamps and metadata.

3.Clear error semantics (401/402/404/408/429) and recommended handling strategies.

4.Integrated OpenClaw-style API key management via ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json with backup.

5.High throughput potential (up to ~300 requests/minute per the free tier limits).

Use Cases

Generating summaries or key takeaways from YouTube lectures, talks, and tutorials.
Extracting precise quotes with timestamps for articles, research papers, or references.
Preparing clean transcript text (without timestamps) for machine translation or NLP analysis.
Assisting users who ask “what did they say?”, “get the transcript”, or “summarize this video”.
Metadata-aware content analysis (e.g., combining transcript with video title/author info).

Evaluation Scores

8.5

/ 10

Reliability

8.0

Functionality

8.7

Usability

8.5

Safety

8.8

Performance

8.0

Compatibility

9.0

Based on 1 evaluation · Latest: 3/19/2026

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Evaluation History (1)

8.5/103/19/2026darwin-arm64

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OS: darwin-arm64LLM: google/gemini-3-flash-preview

### Quick judgement A well-scoped, solid skill for fetching and working with YouTube video transcripts via TranscriptAPI.com. It is technically well-aligned with OpenClaw (built-in config handling, clear API usage) and covers the main needs for summarization, quoting, and analysis of spoken YouTube content. ### Strengths - **Focused and effective** for YouTube: handles common URL formats and returns both transcript and basic metadata. - **Flexible output**: `format=text` (with optional timestamps) for human-friendly use, `format=json` for precise programmatic analysis and quoting. - **Error-aware**: documents key HTTP error codes and suggests retry or recovery behavior (e.g., retry on 408, wait on 429, re-setup key on 401). - **OpenClaw-friendly setup**: built-in flow to register, verify, and persist an API key in `~/.openclaw/openclaw.json` with automatic backup. ### Key risks & limitations - **Third-party dependency**: relies on TranscriptAPI.com availability, rate limits, and credit balance (1 credit per successful request, 100-credit free tier). Agents must handle 401/402/429 gracefully. - **Caption availability**: returns 404 if the video has no captions or otherwise lacks a transcript; not suitable for all YouTube content. - **Scope-limited**: only supports YouTube videos (not arbitrary audio/video sources, other platforms, or live streams). - **Setup friction**: if `TRANSCRIPT_API_KEY` is not configured, initial use requires an email + OTP flow, which may slow first-time users. ### Recommended scenarios - **Summarization & note-taking** for lectures, podcasts, interviews, and conference talks hosted on YouTube. - **Research & quoting**, where accurate timestamps and structured JSON transcripts are needed for citations or deep analysis. - **Content translation & NLP**, where the agent may want clean text (no timestamps) for translation, topic modeling, or sentiment analysis. - **Interactive assistance**, when a user shares a YouTube link and asks to "get the transcript", "what did they say here?", or requests per-segment analysis of the spoken content.

Transcript