Turning a recorded lecture into notes you can actually search

I'll be upfront about my position: I built the tool I'm describing here. Read this as a maker explaining a workflow, not as a neutral review.

The problem I kept running into is simple. A recorded lecture, a conference talk, a training video — the content is good, but it's locked in a format you can't search, skim, or quote. Rewatching an hour to find one two-minute passage is the worst kind of study time there is.

The workflow

Paste the video link. You get two things side by side: the full transcript, and an AI summary of it.

The transcript matters more than people expect. A summary tells you what a video was about; only the verbatim lets you quote a speaker correctly or find the exact moment something was said.

From there:

• Ask follow-up questions about the video's content, which lets you interrogate a talk you haven't fully watched.
• View an auto-generated mind map of its structure — useful when a lecture has an argument shape you want students to see rather than just hear.
• When the video walks through a process step by step, you also get a flow diagram of it.
• Export everything to Notion, Obsidian, or plain Markdown. For a class this is the part I'd argue matters most: notes that land in a student's own system get reread, and notes trapped in a browser tab get closed.

It works with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram links. Summaries can be produced in 14 output languages, chosen independently of the interface language — which turned out to matter more than I expected for students working in a second language.

What it doesn't do

It doesn't watch the video for you, and I'd be careful about presenting it to students as if it did.

A summary of a lecture is a map, not the territory. It's good for deciding whether an hour-long talk is worth the hour, and for finding your way back to a passage you half-remember. It is not a substitute for having sat through the argument.

Transcripts also inherit whatever the speaker's audio quality was. Proper names and technical terms are where you'll want to check before quoting.

Practical notes

It runs in the browser — there's nothing to install. YouTube summaries work without an account, which matters if you want students to try it without adding another signup to their week. Re-opening a video that's already been processed is served from cache.

The free tier is 2 summaries a day without an account for videos up to 15 minutes, or 3 a day signed in for videos up to an hour. That tier includes the follow-up questions, all the summary templates, and all 14 output languages.

If you try it on a real lecture and it does something dumb, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. That's the more useful half of the feedback.

→ SummarizeVideoToText