Comment by fardinahsan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fardinahsan | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I made two recently.

- TalkToYoutuber[1]: Download the transcripts from a youtube channel and hook it up to gtp4 with RAG to let me "talk" to youtubers. There's a bunch of youtubers who have useful knowledge to share, but no blog or wiki, so semantic searching their video transcripts is the next best thing.

- YoutubeThumbnailSearch[2] - Embded all of a youtube channels thumbnails using CLIP and search them using text. I often need to search through news channels with 10k+ videos, often in foreign languages, so not having to rely on the title or transcript but the video thumbnail helps. This is a much more niche usecase tbf.

I am thinking of making a scaled down version of [1] so I can "talk" to long videos, like conference speeches or university lectures. Should take an hour or two to cook it up since it will reuse most of the code from [1].

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[1] https://github.com/FardinAhsan146/TalkToYoutuber

[2] https://github.com/FardinAhsan146/YoutubeThumbnailSearch

Something like talktoyoutuber would also be very useful for certain discord servers. They'll have a lot of knowledge on something but will gatekeep it with "just use the search." and they'll refuse to build a wiki or really engage in any kind of organization.

I can cook it up if it would actually get some users.

Ultimately, I want to make a tool where you can plug in any arbitrary document store/scraper to an LLM with RAG. But I think we are still not there yet in terms of all purpose scrapers.

> I am thinking of making a scaled down version of [1] so I can "talk" to long videos, like conference speeches or university lectures. Should take an hour or two to cook it up since it will reuse most of the code from [1].

This would be useful to me as well. If you do end up making it, could you reference it on your existingGithub

Yeah, I'll add a reference to it. Are you watching the repo ?

this is a really cool project, you should send it to people at youtube, get a job there and implement this in their sidebar...

The projects are dead simple. I think if Youtube wanted to, the would have implemented this long back. It's probably a legal landmine and financial tar pit. But thanks nevertheless.

You’d be shocked at how hard it is to fund, start, and ship even a basic project at a company the size of YT or anything else in the Google/Alphabetaverse. It’s probably also a legal landmine and all that, but organizational friction’s more than sufficient to explain simple useful features failing to ship.

Don't forget how Google incentivizes projects, one gets promoted for shipping the project, not for maintaining it. If indeed this were shipped at YouTube, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets slowly deprecated or outright shuttered in a few years. It's better to keep it open source for everyone.

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