I made a YouTube summarizer, Summary Cat.

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Technical Details

Goal: Generate brief and coherent summaries from YouTube video transcripts

Motivation of building this project: to save myself time watching videos that are too long.

Stack • Frontend: HTML/CSS, plus a tiny bit of Javascript for handling the button • Backend: Python/Flask • Flask served as the backend web framework, handling routes and integrating various services. • Front+Backend has about 500 lines in total • Hosting: AWS Free-tier Elastic Beanstalk • Database: AWS Free-tier RDS

APIs: • For grabbing YouTube's transcripts: I used youtube-transcript-api (https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/) • For summarizing the transcripts: I used OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo-16k: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/gpt. • I used GPT-3.5 because GPT-4 is quite a lot more expensive (roughly 10X).

My Prompt (Super Simple!) • "please summarize the following text into a few paragraphs:" + the full transcript.

Thoughts about GPT-4 vs GPT-3.5-Turbo-16k or Summary Cat • GPT-4 was 20% better for "summary quality" • GPT-4 feels 50% faster • However, GPT-4 is about 10X as expensive as GPT-3.5