Summarizer GPT Prompts for YouTube

My Video Prompts

For members interested in how I have been generating my summaries lately, here are the nuts and bolts of how I use GPT. A wealth of knowledge is buried in old videos, books, and web archives, and GPT gives me a great way to organize that material for researchers.

Below are the Chat-GPT 4o Prompts I use to summarize YouTube videos (Using the Summarizer GPT). They are imperfect, and you need to check the outputs and adjust accordingly. Also, GPT chats build knowledge as you continue to submit more prompts, so I often wait to do a full summary as the last query (it improves the results).

You can grab transcripts in several different ways. My preferred methods are a website called Tactiq and a plugin called YouTube to Text. Tactiq is good for most recent videos because the granularity of the timestamps is 3 seconds, but it only works on videos that have been uploaded recently (I’m not sure how far back). YouTube to Text, but the timestamps are not as granular. Where Tactiq is every 3 seconds,

The funny-looking formatting is called “Markdown” and is one of the oldest ways for computers to know how to format plain text. The prompt input windows are plain text, so for you to tell the AI model what you want, you need to explain it in a format that it understands (markdown).

Two markdown resources that you may find useful are Obsidian, a free desktop Markdown editor, and Dillinger.io, an online website that converts markdown to Rich Text Format and HTML.