YouTLDW

YouTLDW is built around a single, refreshingly narrow idea: you already have ChatGPT, and you already have a transcript problem. Rather than hosting its own summarization model or building a dashboard, the extension grabs the caption track from the YouTube page you are on and hands the whole thing to ChatGPT with a prompt attached. The default click yields a bullet-point summary of the video; the pencil button opens a field where you type whatever instruction you want ChatGPT to run against the transcript, from extracting action items to translating passages or drafting a response.

That design has a clear practical shape. Because the extension piggybacks on your existing ChatGPT login, there is no separate subscription, no credits and no account to create — the extension itself is completely free and the developer's Chrome Web Store disclosure states that no user data is collected or sold to third parties. It also means the extension inherits ChatGPT's limits, and the developer notes that you must be signed into ChatGPT with no captcha prompts pending, otherwise you will need to return to YouTube and click the button again.

At just 55 KB with 9 users and version 1.1 released in September 2024, YouTLDW is a small, single-author utility rather than a polished commercial product. What makes it useful is the workflow: it strips out the copy-paste step between YouTube's caption panel and a chat window, which is exactly the repetitive motion that makes summarizing long videos tedious.