How to Summarize a YouTube Video: 6 Ways That Work

To summarize a YouTube video with AI, give the video’s link to a tool that reads its captions and writes the summary. As of November 2026 the practical options are a dedicated app (such as SumAI on iPhone and iPad), a browser extension on a computer (such as Glasp), Google’s Gemini Notebook, and YouTube’s own Ask YouTube feature where it is offered. Almost all of them need captions.

SumAI is our app, so weigh our view accordingly. Availability, prices and limits below were checked in November 2026 and can change.

How do the six ways to summarize a YouTube video compare?

Method	Where it works	What you get	Main catch
Read the transcript yourself	YouTube app; youtube.com on a computer	The captions as text, with lines that jump to the moment	No summary: you do the reading
Ask YouTube	YouTube on Android, iOS, computers and TVs	AI answers about the video you are watching	Listed regions and select videos only
Gemini app or Gemini Notebook	Web, iPhone and Android	A summary and a chat; Notebook adds study tools	Notebook needs a public video with captions
ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity	ChatGPT browser extension; Perplexity’s Comet browser	A summary and answers in a chat	A pasted link is not a documented feature
Browser extensions and web tools	Desktop browsers	A summary and transcript beside the video	Built for a computer; free use is limited
Dedicated app such as SumAI	iPhone and iPad	Summary, chapters, chat, transcript, study tools	Needs captions; no Android or web version

Method 1: read the transcript yourself

YouTube offers a transcript for any video that has captions. YouTube’s Help Center gives one instruction for every device: open the video’s description and select Show transcript. The transcript scrolls along with playback, and selecting a line jumps to that point in the video.

Reading the transcript is free, and you get the captions in full, with nothing condensed. It suits short videos and moments when the exact wording matters, but you do the summarizing yourself.

On a phone there are extra limits. In our November 2026 checks, YouTube’s mobile website showed no transcript, and YouTube provides no button for copying or downloading one. How to get a YouTube transcript on iPhone covers the workarounds.

Method 2: Ask YouTube, the AI feature built into YouTube

Ask YouTube is YouTube’s own AI tool on the watch page. According to YouTube’s help page, you can ask a question about the video you are watching, or pick a suggested prompt, and get an AI-generated answer without leaving the video. As of November 2026 its availability is narrow:

• Who: signed-in users aged 13 or older (or the local minimum age). Supervised child accounts and YouTube Kids are excluded. The help page does not mention a YouTube Premium requirement.
• Where: a fixed list of regions and languages. The list includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, India and Japan. When we checked, it did not include any of the 27 EU member states or Australia.
• Which videos: select videos only.

If Ask YouTube appears under a video, it is the quickest route for a single question, because there is nothing to copy or install. It is a question-and-answer tool, though: the help page describes answers and related content, not saved summaries, transcript export or study tools, and it warns that answers may be inaccurate. SumAI vs Ask YouTube has a side-by-side view.

Method 3: the Gemini app or Gemini Notebook

Google offers two routes for YouTube videos, and it documents them differently.

Gemini app. Google’s help page says Gemini can find YouTube videos and help you understand their content, using public information from YouTube. Its example is asking Gemini to find videos on a topic and then summarize the first one.

You need to be signed in with the Keep Activity setting turned on, and the feature is not available in Live chats or in Gemini in Google Messages. The page does not describe pasting a link, and it does not say whether the video needs captions.

Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM). A YouTube link is a documented source type here. Google’s source rules say:

• Only public videos with captions, uploaded or auto-generated, are supported, and only the text transcript is imported.
• Videos uploaded less than 72 hours earlier may not import.
• Videos without speech are not supported.
• There is no length limit unless the caption file is longer than 500,000 words.

After import you can chat with the video, get answers that cite it, and create flashcards and quizzes. Gemini Notebook is the better choice when you want to combine a video with PDFs, documents and web pages in one notebook. On iPhone, Google says you can share a YouTube video to the app, but creating mind maps, notes and reports is not yet available on mobile. More detail: SumAI vs Gemini Notebook.

Method 4: ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity

General AI assistants are where expectations and documentation differ most. As of November 2026:

• ChatGPT. OpenAI documents one route: the side chat of the ChatGPT browser extension in Chrome, Edge, Brave or Vivaldi. With a YouTube video open, and when captions are available, ChatGPT can use the video’s timestamped transcript to explain or summarize it. Pasting a YouTube link into the regular chat, on the web or in the mobile app, is not a documented feature.
• Claude. Anthropic’s help center says Claude can fetch a web page from a link when web search is on, and that links occasionally fail. It documents no YouTube or video-transcript feature.
• Perplexity. Perplexity describes video summaries for its Comet browser, which can take a video link (YouTube is named), transcribe it and summarize it. We found no such statement for the standard Perplexity app or website.

We did not test pasted links in these apps, and the vendors do not document them, so check any summary you get that way against the video. The dependable fallback is to copy the transcript on a computer and paste the text into the chat.

Method 5: browser extensions and web tools on a computer

If you watch YouTube in a desktop browser, an extension can put the summary next to the video. Three well-known examples, as of November 2026:

• Glasp is an extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari that shows the transcript beside the video and summarizes it with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Mistral. Its free plan lists 3 basic summaries a day and 3 advanced summaries per 7 days. Pro costs $15 a month. Glasp also has iPhone and Android apps.
• NoteGPT is a web app with Chrome and Edge extensions: paste a link and it returns a summary and a transcript. Its pricing page also covers videos without subtitles, with a length cap that depends on the plan. Pro costs $9.99 a month.
• Eightify adds a summary panel to the YouTube page through Chrome and Safari extensions. Its Chrome Web Store listing describes a 7-day free trial.

Method 6: a dedicated iPhone or iPad app such as SumAI

On an iPhone or iPad, the natural route is to share the video from the YouTube app to a summarizer app. SumAI is built for that. You share or paste a link, pick one of five summary styles (TL;DR, Standard, Detailed, Study Guide or Chapters) and a language, and SumAI reads the video’s transcript and returns the summary in seconds.

Around the summary you get chapters and key moments with tappable times, Ask AI for follow-up questions, the full transcript, a mind map, a quiz and flashcards. Summaries can be written in more than 60 languages.

The limits are plain. SumAI needs the video to have captions or auto-generated subtitles. It runs on iPhone and iPad (and on Apple-silicon Macs and Apple Vision Pro as the iPad app), and there is no Android app, web app or browser extension.

SumAI is free to download, with an optional Premium subscription ($2.99 a week or $29.99 a year in the US). Like any AI summary, a SumAI summary can miss nuance or get a detail wrong, so check important points against the video.

SumAI is not the only app of this kind: Summarify, for example, also summarizes YouTube videos from their transcripts on iPhone and iPad.

Why do some videos fail in every tool?

Nearly every method above reads the caption track, so the same videos tend to fail everywhere: videos without captions, new uploads whose automatic captions are not ready, streams that are still live, and music or silent footage. Why AI can’t summarize some YouTube videos covers each cause and its fix.

Which method should you use?

• You need the exact words, or the video is short: read the transcript.
• Ask YouTube appears under the video and you have one question: use it.
• You are collecting videos, PDFs and web pages for one project: Gemini Notebook.
• You already work in ChatGPT on a computer: the browser extension’s side chat.
• You watch at a desk and want the summary beside the video: a browser extension such as Glasp.
• You watch on an iPhone or iPad and want the summary, chapters, a chat and study tools in one app: a dedicated app. Download SumAI to try that route.

Whichever method you pick, treat the summary as a map of the video, and check any point you plan to rely on at its timestamp.