Second Brain for YouTube
A Chrome extension that transcribes and summarises any YouTube video, then files the notes into Capacities or hands you the markdown.
- Type
- Chrome extension
- Built
- 2024
- Status
- Deprecated — listing still up, revival planned
- Stack
- JavaScript · Chrome Extension APIs · Capacities API
About the project
I learn a lot from YouTube and retain much less of it than I would like. Watching a good technical talk feels productive in the moment and then evaporates within a week. This extension is the fix I built for myself: a second brain that captures what I watched so the knowledge survives the tab being closed.
It transcribes the video you are on, summarises the transcript, and gives you the result as structured notes. The summarisation runs client-side off the parsed DOM rather than calling out to a paid API, so using it costs nothing and there is no key to manage.
The part I use most is the Capacities integration. If you run Capacities as your note system, the transcript and summary go straight into it, so the note exists before you have decided whether you care. If you are not on the Capacities pro tier, the extension exports the same content as markdown or HTML instead, which means the feature degrades rather than disappearing.
It is on the Chrome Web Store and was launched on Product Hunt. It is currently deprecated — an upstream dependency broke it and I have not yet done the work to revive it, so treat the listing as a record of what it did rather than something to install today.
More side projects are on the projects page, and the free browser-only utilities live under tools. Built by Himanshu Srivastava, a backend systems engineer in Bengaluru, India.