| name | youtube-transcript |
| description | Fetch the transcript and title of a YouTube video as JSON. Use when the user provides a YouTube URL and you need the spoken content (captions) for analysis, summarization, quoting, or search. |
YouTube Transcript
Fetches a YouTube video's title and full transcript by pulling captions via yt-dlp. Prefers manual English subtitles, falls back to auto-generated English.
Requirements
yt-dlp on PATH (brew install yt-dlp)- Python 3
Usage
python3 ~/.pi/agent/skills/youtube-transcript/fetch_transcript.py "<youtube_url>"
Output
Prints a JSON object to stdout:
{
"title": "Video title",
"transcript": "full transcript text as a single string"
}
Progress/info logs go to stderr. On failure (no English captions, network error, bad URL), the script exits non-zero with a message on stderr.
Notes
- Only English captions are attempted (
en, en-US, en-GB, then any en*). Manual captions are preferred over auto-generated.
- Transcript is plain text with timing/formatting stripped — not timestamped.
- For non-English videos or videos with captions disabled, the script will fail; consider
video_extract with a Gemini prompt as a fallback.
