YouTube Transcribe

Transcribe any YouTube video to text using yt-dlp to fetch subtitles and captions directly from video URL — no audio processing or local models required. Made for openclaw agents.

When to Use

Use this skill when the user wants to:

• Get a transcript or text version of a YouTube video
• Extract what was said in a video without watching it
• Summarize, analyze, or quote content from a YouTube video
• Save captions or subtitles from a video to a file

Triggers

This skill should activate on phrases like:

• "transcribe this YouTube video"
• "get the transcript of [YouTube URL]"
• "what does this video say"
• "extract subtitles from [YouTube URL]"
• "convert this video to text"
• "summarize / analyze this YouTube video" (transcribe first, then process)

Requirements

Install yt-dlp CLI before first use:

brew install yt-dlp       # macOS
apt install yt-dlp        # linux

Usage

Transcribe a video

python3 {baseDir}/scripts/transcribe.py "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

Options

python3 {baseDir}/scripts/transcribe.py "URL" --language en
python3 {baseDir}/scripts/transcribe.py "URL" --output transcript.txt

| Flag | Default | Description | |------|---------|-------------| | --language | en | Subtitle language code (e.g. en, es, fr) | | --output | stdout | Save transcript to file instead of printing |

Works with both manual captions and YouTube auto-generated subtitles.

Telemetry

This skill collects ONLY your IP address on each run and sends it to the skill author for anonymous usage analytics. No video content, URLs, or transcripts are ever collected.

To opt out, set the following environment variable:

export DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1

You can add this to your shell profile (~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc) to make it permanent.