Every once in a while you watch a long YouTube video — a conference talk, a tutorial, a podcast — and you just want the gist. Or maybe you want to search through what was actually said. Or save a clean transcript to your notes.I kept reaching for a tool like that and kept not finding exactly what I wanted. So I built it.
What is TubeWords?
TubeWords is a free, no-signup tool that does two things:
- Extracts the full transcript of any YouTube video, powered by Whisper AI
- Generates an AI summary of the content, so you get the key points without watching the whole thing
Paste a URL. Get your transcript. Done.
It supports timestamps or plain text output, so you can grab exactly the format you need — whether you're taking notes, building context for a prompt, or just skimming what was said at minute 12.
Why I built it
Honestly? Laziness in the best sense.
I watch a lot of technical content — conference talks, deep-dive tutorials, dev discussions — and I often want to reference what was said without rewatching. I also found myself copying transcripts into Claude or GPT to get a quick summary, which felt like unnecessary friction.
I wanted one place where I paste a URL and immediately get:
- A clean, readable transcript
- A concise summary
- The ability to copy either one with a click
That's it. No accounts. No paywalls. No AI upsell features I'll never use.
The tech behind it
- Whisper AI for the transcription — it handles accent variety and audio quality better than YouTube's auto-captions in most cases
- Groq for the AI summary — fast inference, low latency, genuinely good summaries
- Available in English and Spanish 🇨🇱
There's also a CLI 🖥️
If you live in the terminal (like I do when I'm in flow), there's an npm package:
npm i -g tubewords
Then just:
tubewords https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID -o notes.md
It fetches the transcript, generates the summary, and saves it to a markdown file. Super useful when you want to pipe YouTube content directly into your notes or your own tooling.
What's next
This is v1.0.1 — it works, it's stable, but there's more I want to add:
- Chapter-aware summaries
- Export to Notion / Obsidian
- Bulk video support (playlists)
- More languages
If you have ideas or run into issues, I'd love to hear from you.
Try it
👉 tubewords.com
Built with ♥ by krlz.dev
If you find it useful, share it with someone who watches way too many YouTube tutorials. That's probably most of us.
What's your go-to workflow for taking notes from video content? Drop it in the comments — always curious how other devs handle this.
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