[HN Gopher] TexTube: Chat with any YouTube video transcript in C...
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       TexTube: Chat with any YouTube video transcript in ChatGPT fast
        
       Author : ofou
       Score  : 54 points
       Date   : 2024-09-17 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (chatgpt.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (chatgpt.com)
        
       | owenpalmer wrote:
       | This approach really doesn't make sense to me. The model has to
       | output the entire transcript token by token, instead of simply
       | adding it to the context window...
       | 
       | A more interesting idea would be a browser extension that lets
       | you open a chat window from within YouTube, letting you ask it
       | questions about certain parts of the transcript with full context
       | in the system prompt.
        
         | ofou wrote:
         | For sure, that's an interesting idea, but potentially very
         | costly (for longer videos). A plus side of this strategy is
         | that the Transcription gets clean up a lot and also the math
         | notation fix up too. So, it's just a cleaner text, well
         | formatted for people who like to read videos instead of
         | mindlessly watching a video.
         | 
         | We're at Emergent Mind are working on providing bits of a
         | technical transcript to a model and then asking follow up
         | questions. You can check it out here http://emergentmind.com if
         | curious.
        
         | hombre_fatal wrote:
         | Until I read other comments here, I assumed that's what they
         | were doing since it bugged out on me and didn't regurgitate the
         | transcript back to me yet still let me ask questions about it.
         | 
         | https://chatgpt.com/share/66e9f5ae-8d20-8000-b3a5-7c1ba928b8...
        
         | vunderba wrote:
         | That's initially what I thought this was. Seems like somebody
         | had the same concept, there's an extension called "AskTube"
         | which looks like it does exactly this.
         | 
         | https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/asktube-ai-youtube-...
        
       | Workaccount2 wrote:
       | I don't know if everyone has access to it (might just be yt
       | premium), but many videos have an "ask gemini about this video"
       | button, where you can directly ask questions about the video.
        
         | ofou wrote:
         | It might be a preview or something because I have YT premium
         | and doesn't show up that anywhere. Can you share a video that
         | works for that? Like this one.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g
        
           | hombre_fatal wrote:
           | It's only available in the Android app, but you can activate
           | it here: https://www.youtube.com/new
        
           | vunderba wrote:
           | Here's a video demo from about 3 months ago:
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgYIFiWgBl8
           | 
           | It looks like its currently limited to Android phones.
        
         | adzm wrote:
         | It is a beta feature in YouTube premium and doesn't seem to be
         | for all videos, but it has been extremely useful in my
         | experience. You can even ask where in a video things are
         | discussed etc.
        
       | afro88 wrote:
       | When I try it it just says "Not found"
        
         | ofou wrote:
         | Can you share the link?
        
       | jonwinstanley wrote:
       | What does it mean by chat with a transcript?
       | 
       | I.e. what are the kind of things I can ask and get value from?
        
         | kylebenzle wrote:
         | Nothing, it means nothing, like most of this "AI" hype
         | nonsense.
         | 
         | They copy paste text transcripts into an Llm and have it
         | generate more text based on its training and prompt data. You
         | can't "chat" with a text document of course.
        
           | camus_absurd wrote:
           | I'm not sure I follow. Can you explain 'you can't chat with a
           | text document' because you clearly can.
        
             | hombre_fatal wrote:
             | Is anyone even chomping at the bit to hear a pedant explain
             | how "chatting with a text document" isn't the most precise
             | way to phrase this concept that we all understand?
        
           | yreg wrote:
           | Chat with the document means chat about that document with an
           | LLM who has "read" it.
           | 
           | It can be useful; it's not hype nonsense.
        
             | jonwinstanley wrote:
             | Ahh ok.
             | 
             | So rather than watch the video or read the transcript you
             | just ask the one thing you want to know.
             | 
             | Could it take you to the moment in the video that is useful
             | too?
        
         | ofou wrote:
         | First, I would say that reading is faster than watching.
         | Therefore, it is more time-efficient to read a YouTube video,
         | especially if it covers technical content or interesting ideas.
         | Additionally, you can ask follow-up questions about the
         | content, and since it's in an OAI conversation, you can
         | leverage the "intelligence" of the model to help you understand
         | the parts that you find difficult. Sometimes, I watch technical
         | YouTube videos and wish I had a written version; so here it is.
         | 
         | This is an interesting example, it feels different than
         | watching the ~12min video.
         | https://chatgpt.com/share/66e9eaff-248c-8009-9761-d848d97881...
        
       | romseb wrote:
       | It does not work with long form conversations like podcasts.
       | 
       | "I was unable to retrieve the transcript for this video due to
       | its large size."
        
         | ofou wrote:
         | Coming soon! Currently, it works for videos under one hour.
         | This limitation is due to ChatGPT's context window when using
         | Plugins. I don't know why since it should support 200k
         | tokens... Alternatively, you can use
         | https://textube.olivares.cl to get the full transcription for
         | any video in English.
        
       | tsunamifury wrote:
       | allofus.ai already congregates all of the thinking of any creator
       | on YouTube into a single mental model and allows you to interact
       | with their synthetic self.
        
         | CamperBob2 wrote:
         | Now that does sound intriguing, but it just leads to a blank
         | page...?
        
       | iorrus wrote:
       | I've been using Voxscript [0] for a while, after comparing the
       | two I think voxscript is better, gives longer more detailed
       | summaries, TexTube just seems to give a very brief impersonal
       | overview. Easy to try both and see which you prefer.
       | 
       | [0] https://chatgpt.com/g/g-g24EzkDta-voxscript
        
         | ofou wrote:
         | TexTube is not giving summaries but the actual transcripts.
         | Plus, mine is way faster ;)
         | 
         | Compare the results:
         | 
         | TexTube:
         | https://chatgpt.com/share/66e9f424-32c4-8009-b761-c8a8d6fbec...
         | VoxScript:
         | https://chatgpt.com/share/66e9f443-31d8-8009-b396-dba11b2f5b...
        
           | iorrus wrote:
           | Hmm it didn't work that way for me, first I asked it to
           | summarise a video, then I simply posted the link to the video
           | assuming it would give the transcript, in both cases it
           | summarised the transcript.
           | 
           | But if I start a new session and simply paste the link to the
           | video it gives the transcript. I'm not sure an llm is the
           | best solution to getting full transcripts.
        
             | ofou wrote:
             | you should copy and paste a youtube url and that's it
        
       | yawnxyz wrote:
       | is this better than the Youtube-generated transcript / captions
       | you'd get from something like
       | https://github.com/Kakulukian/youtube-transcript?
        
       | andai wrote:
       | Very nice. I made a thing in Python which summarizes a YouTube
       | transcript in bullet points. Never thought about asking it
       | questions, that's a great idea!
       | 
       | I just run yt-dlp to fetch the transcript and shove it in the GPT
       | prompt. (I think also have a few lines to remove the timestamps,
       | although arguably those would be useful to keep.)
       | 
       | My prompt is "{transcript} Please summarize the above in bullet
       | points"
       | 
       | The trick was splitting it up into overlapping chunks so it fits
       | in the context size. (And then summarizing your summary because
       | it ends up too long cause you had so many chunks!)
       | 
       | These days that's not so important, usually you can shove an
       | entire book in! (Unless you're using a local model, which still
       | have small context sizes, work pretty well for summarization.)
        
         | HPsquared wrote:
         | If you're going as far as using yt-dlp, why not run the audio
         | through Whisper?
        
           | andai wrote:
           | Interesting, I haven't used Whisper, is it cost effective?
           | Seems to be about 36 cents per (hour long) video? How long
           | does processing take?
        
             | kajecounterhack wrote:
             | You can run it locally, and it's really fast. But since
             | YouTube transcription is really good, I don't see why you'd
             | use Whisper and get a worse transcription (unless maybe
             | it's on videos that Google did not transcribe for whatever
             | reason).
        
               | gs17 wrote:
               | > But since YouTube transcription is really good
               | 
               | Are you sure you're looking at automatic transcripts?
               | YouTube transcripts are bizarrely low quality if they're
               | not provided by the creators (I've actually used my
               | _Google_ Pixel 's live transcription to make better
               | captions occasionally).
               | 
               | I just checked a video my girlfriend uploaded a week ago
               | and the auto-transcript was still pretty messy. I've used
               | Whisper for the same task and it's significantly better.
        
           | davidzweig wrote:
           | The security against downloading audio from YouTube has been
           | upped recently with 'PO tokens'.
           | 
           | Whisper is only a few tenths of a cent per hour transcribed
           | if transcribing on your gpu though, at about 30x real-time on
           | a 3080 etc. with batching.
        
       | lupusreal wrote:
       | Seems like fishing with hand grenades to me. I just download the
       | subs and grep that.
        
         | mdp2021 wrote:
         | Even just experience with `man`-pages, "/<term>", show that it
         | is a suboptimal strategy that leaves querying an understanding
         | reader engine to be desired.
        
           | lupusreal wrote:
           | Really? I generally have a good experience with searching
           | manpages. My big grip with those is the man program itself.
        
       | righthand wrote:
       | Nice, hallucinate a text document about video content. Next is
       | hallucinating a video from a text document hallucinated from a
       | video?
        
         | hombre_fatal wrote:
         | It uses a real transcript.
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-17 23:00 UTC)