aToad #35: Decopy.ai YouTube Subtitle Downloader

Online tool (“SaaS”, yuck) to extract subtitles from YouTube videos.

I recently snatched a yearly subscription to Perplexity for free (yay!), and one of the great uses I found for it is to have it summarize YouTube videos, because let’s face it, videos are, with very limited exceptions, a horribly inefficient way to convey information: you’ll probably be done reading this post in under a minute, while I could probably have turned it into a 10-minute crappy sponsored video.
Unfortunately, it still has its limitations. Notably, as I understood, it doesn’t actually read the video, but just the transcript. And sometimes there is no transcript, just subtitles, which it, for some reason, isn’t able to read either.

Here comes the title-mentioned YouTube Subtitle Downloader. You give it the video URL, it gets you the subtitles, with a downloadable transcript. It also makes its own AI-generated summary. I didn’t find it that good, but if you don’t have another AI tool, I guess it’s better than nothing.
As far as I’m concerned, I just download the transcript and send it to Perplexity and voilà.

I believe this is the first time* I post an online-only tool (those horrible “SaaS”) here and this is not really the kind of tools I had in mind when creating the section. I’m making an exception here because YouTube is quite ubiquitous, and so is wasting time on videos that are way longer than they should, and an online-only tool isn’t that much of a huge deal if it targets just a specific online-only service. But don’t expect this to be the new normal here, I’ll be keeping the focus on “proper” tools, i.e. those you can actually own.

Last but not least, Decopy.ai also provides a bunch of other tools, which I haven’t all tried. But as far as I’ve experimented, their AI detector and AI “humanizer” are pretty bad: the first said my post looked “42% AI” (yeah right), and asking it to humanize it made it look like it was written by a retarded tiktoker (pleonasm) – not to mention that after “humanization”, it was still “30% AI”.

*Addendum: actually, I now realize that I previously listed some online tools for handling PDFs, I guess that for these there was some similar rationale: PDF editing is a ubiquitous pain in the butt, just like YouTube.