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Overview

The YouTube Video Summarizer template streamlines how teams extract insights from YouTube content. Instead of manually reviewing full videos, this workflow reads links from Google Sheets, retrieves subtitles, and generates structured summaries. Whether you're performing competitor analysis, studying a lecture, or organizing research, this AI YouTube summarizer allows you to quickly collect and compare video takeaways—all saved directly in your Sheet.

Who This Is For

  • Marketing & product teams: Analyze competitor videos, feature launches, or user reviews to capture core messaging and customer feedback.
  • Content creators & YouTube teams: Turn your own videos into ready-to-use text for descriptions, blog posts, newsletters, and social media snippets.
  • Content researchers & analysts: Quickly extract key insights from large playlists, expert interviews, or product walkthroughs without watching every minute.
  • Students & academics: Summarize YouTube videos such as lectures, talks, and documentaries to organize study notes and support literature reviews or research projects.

How It Works

This template connects Google Sheets, Apify, and an LLM to automate the entire YouTube video summarization loop:

1. The workflow reads all YouTube URLs from the specified input worksheet in your Google Sheet.

2. It organizes and iterates through the URL list, handling each video one by one.

3. For every URL, it calls Apify to scrape the complete English subtitle transcript.

4. The transcript is passed to an LLM to generate a concise summary of the video’s core ideas.

5. The final summary is formatted and appended as a new row in your designated “summary” worksheet, creating a permanent, searchable record for each video.

What You'll Need

  • A Google account and access to Google Sheets
  • A Google Sheet with:
    • One worksheet containing the YouTube URLs (one URL per line)
    • One worksheet reserved for storing summary results
  • An Apify account and valid API Token
  • YouTube videos that have accessible English subtitles

How to Use

  1. Step 1.Prepare your Google Sheet
    • Create a new Google Sheet.
    • In the first worksheet (e.g., VideoURLs), paste the YouTube video URLs you want to summarize—one URL per row.
    • Create a second worksheet (e.g., Summaries) where the workflow will write summary results.
  1. Step 2.Get your Apify API token
    • Sign up or log in at Apify.
    • Go to your account settings and copy your API Token.
  1. Step 3.Configure workflow input parameters

    2. Open the YouTube Video Summarizer template and fill in the startup parameters:

    • SpreadsheetId – Paste the Google Sheet ID (the string between /d/ and /edit in the URL).
    • URLSheetName – Enter the name of the worksheet that contains the YouTube URLs.
    • API Token – Paste the Apify API token you obtained.
    • AbstractSheetName – Enter the name of the worksheet where summaries should be stored.

      • Next, authorize your Google Sheets access:

    • In the “Get Rows in Sheet” node, authorize your Google account to allow GoInsight.AI to read the video URL worksheet.
    • In the “Write Summary to Sheet” node, authorize your Google account again to allow GoInsight.AI to write summary results to the target worksheet.
      1. Step 4.Run and review
        • Execute the workflow.
        • The system will iterate over each URL, generate summaries, and write them to the target worksheet.
        • Open your summary worksheet to review, edit, or export the results as needed.h tailored to AI financial analyst or financial data analyst workflows.

FAQs

Does this YouTube video summary generator support non-English videos?
By default, it’s optimized for videos with English subtitles. If subtitles are available in other languages, you can adapt the Apify configuration and LLM prompt to summarize those as well.
What happens if a video has no subtitles or the URL is invalid?
If a video has no accessible subtitles or the URL is broken, the Apify step will fail for that item and the workflow will skip or log an error row in your sheet so you can review it manually.
Will this overwrite existing data in my Google Sheet?
No. The workflow appends new summary rows to your specified summary worksheet. Existing data in other columns or rows remains untouched, as long as you don’t change the sheet structure.
How long can each video be?
There is no fixed limit from the template itself, but very long transcripts may be truncated or chunked depending on your LLM’s token limits and your GoInsight.AI configuration. For very long videos, consider splitting URLs across multiple runs.
Can I customize the style or length of the summaries?
Yes. You can adjust the LLM prompt in the “Generate Video Summary” node to change tone, length, or structure—for example, bullet-point takeaways, executive summaries, or key quotes.
Updated on: Dec 25, 2025
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