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No Time for Long Videos? How to Extract Key Insights from YouTube Videos
Guides and Tutorials2025.03.26

No Time for Long Videos? How to Extract Key Insights from YouTube Videos

We’ve all been there: a colleague sends you a 60-minute YouTube video of a conference talk, or you find a promising tutorial, but you simply don’t have an hour to spare. The result? You either skip the video (and possibly miss out on important info) or you let it play in the background while you desperately try to glean the main points, or stay in your favourate lists forever. None of them is ideal. In an era where video content is exploding, from webinars to lectures to podcasts and news interviews, the ability to quickly get the gist of a video is a superpower. Enter the Relic Chrome extension – not just for lengthy webpages and PDFs, it’s also your personal AI video summarizer. This post addresses the pain point of video information overload: too many videos, not enough time or patience to watch them all and nowhere to preserve all these brilliant ideas (you might forget what a lengthy youtube video talking about after a period of time). We’ll show you how Relic can summarize YouTube videos into bite-sized insights, effectively allowing you to “read” a video through mind maps and build your own personal knowledge base and never forget. If you struggle with keeping up with lengthy YouTube content (or just want to save time) or find you another super brain to keep knowledge, read on to learn how Relic makes video consumption hyper-efficient.

Step-by-Step: Using Relic to Summarize and Save YouTube Videos

Relic turns long videos into concise summaries, meaning you can get the key points of a 30-minute video in just a couple of minutes. Here’s a detailed tutorial on how to use Relic for YouTube, from setup to getting those golden nuggets of insight:

  1. Ensure Relic is Installed and Activated:

    1. Go to the Chrome Web Store and search for “Relic AI Summaries” (or use the official link if you have it).
    2. Click on “Add to Chrome”. This installs the extension.
    3. Once installed, pin the extension to your toolbar by clicking the puzzle icon (the “Extensions” menu) and pinning Relic for quick access.

    Make sure you’re logged into your Relic account through the extension so it can save your video summaries.

  2. Find a YouTube Video to Summarize: Open YouTube in Chrome and navigate to the video you’re interested in. This could be anything – a lengthy TED talk, a recorded lecture, a news segment, or even a how-to video. For this example, let’s say it’s a 45-minute tech talk titled “The Secrets to Get Smarter Goals – Y Combinator”. You have the video page open, and the video might even be playing (Relic can work whether it’s playing or paused).

  3. Activate Relic on the Video Page: With the YouTube video page open, click the ****pinned relic icon in the toolbar. Relic’s popup interface will appear. Click “Summerize With Relic” to start the summarization process for this video.

  4. Relic Fetches the Transcript: YouTube provides auto-generated transcripts for many videos, and Relic can tap into that. Once you hit save/summarize, give it a few moments. You may see a message “Processing…” What’s happening is Relic is pulling the text of what’s spoken in the video. (If the video has no transcript available, Relic might not work, but most talks and lectures do have that, either provided by the uploader or auto-generated by YouTube’s AI.)

  5. View the Video Summary and Mind Map: After a brief wait (usually only a few seconds for average-length videos), Relic will present you with the summary. You’ll get a mind map and bullet-point summary of the video’s content. The mind map have the video title as the root, with branches representing the main topics discussed in the video. For example, if the talk “The Underdog: He Turned His Last $1,000 Into $150M” covers 4 big topcis, you will see those as four branches: “Early Struggles” “Key Insights” “Lemlist app's growth” and "Gam's Entrepreneurial advice ". Under each branch, specific insights or tips from the youtube video will be listed as child nodes. You can expand those child nodes and explore more detailed information.

  6. Navigate the Summary: You can now explore the video’s summary. There’s a mind map view, take a look at the structure – it often reveals how the speaker organized their talk. This structure can clue you in on the flow of the video’s content (something you’d normally only get by watching it sequentially). You might discover, for example, that “Entrepreneurial advice” of the talk is the one most relevant to you, and you can directly focus on that branch.

  7. Tag or Save the Summary: You can organize video summaries with customized tags. Perhaps tag it under “Business Advices” or “Lectures 2025” – whatever categorization helps you. The ability to recall video content without re-watching the video is incredibly powerful.

  8. Summerize Multiple Videos : If you’re doing research or studying for a topic, you might have several videos lined up. You can use Relic on each one. It’s much faster to go through, say, five 20-minute video summaries (maybe taking you 10 minutes to read all summaries) than to watch 5 * 20 = 100 minutes of footage. Relic essentially lets you speed-run through video content. Keep in mind, if you’re logged in, all these summaries are being saved. You can later open the Relic dashboard and see a collection of the videos you summarized, each with their key points laid out for review.

Install the Relic chrome extension and give it a try on the next YouTube video in your queue. Perhaps, start with that 20-minute tutorial you bookmarked last week – click Relic and see the key takeaways in moments.

FAQ: Relic for YouTube Video Summaries

You might be curious about specific aspects of how Relic works with videos. Here are some frequently asked questions regarding YouTube summarization:

Q: Does Relic work on any video or only YouTube?A: Currently, Relic is optimized for YouTube because that’s one of the most common platforms with accessible transcripts. The extension uses YouTube’s transcript data to generate summaries. If you have an HTML5 video on another site with a visible transcript, Relic might work, but it’s not guaranteed. YouTube is the sure bet. For other platforms like Vimeo or proprietary video players, support is not be there yet. The team might add support for more sites over time. For now, if it’s a YouTube video (or a YouTube video embedded on another site), you’re good to go.

Q: What if a YouTube video has no subtitles/transcript?A: In cases where a video has subtitles disabled or no auto-generated transcript (this is rare for spoken content, but it can happen, e.g., music videos or pure imagery videos), Relic will have trouble summarizing because it relies on text. If you attempt to summarize such a video, it might return "Something went wrong, please try again". Essentially, Relic needs something to read. For 99% of informative videos (talks, lectures, etc.), YouTube auto-captions will be available and Relic can work with those. So it’s seldom an issue.

Q: How accurate are the video summaries, especially given YouTube’s auto-captions can have errors?A: Good question. Relic’s summary is only as accurate as the input transcript. YouTube’s auto-captions are pretty decent for English and some other languages, but they do make mistakes (especially with technical terms or names). However, even if a few words are off, Relic typically still captures the meaning correctly. For instance, if a transcript misheard “macro economics” as “micro economics,” the summary might use the wrong term – so there is a slight risk of such errors carrying through. In practice, major points come through fine. If accuracy is critical, and the video has an official transcript or subtitles, those will yield a very accurate summary. If you suspect the auto-transcript was poor (maybe the speaker’s audio was low quality), use Relic’s summary as a starting point, but you might want to double-check the original for crucial specifics. On the whole, users find video summaries surprisingly accurate and useful. The errors, if any, are usually minor (and sometimes even entertaining, if an AI mis-heard a joke!). The core content – especially of well-recorded videos – will be summarized reliably.

Q: Can Relic summarize very long videos, like a 3-hour lecture or a full podcast episode on YouTube?A: Relic doesn’t impose a strict time limit from the user side – it will attempt to summarize whatever transcript it can fetch. Very long videos (1 hour, 2 hours, etc.) produce very long transcripts, which means more text for the AI to process. In some cases, Relic’s AI might produce a higher-level summary to keep it concise. You might get something like “This 3-hour video covers numerous topics, here are the broad themes...” with maybe less granular detail than you’d get from a 20-minute video (because it tries to condense more). It’s still extremely helpful to get even a broad strokes summary of a 3-hour webinar in a few paragraphs. But generally, yes, Relic can handle long videos; And understand the summary will focus on main themes to avoid becoming too lengthy itself.

Q: Does using Relic on YouTube violate any terms or get me in trouble on YouTube?A: Using Relic is like using any other browser extension – it’s just helping you read the page’s content (the transcript) and do something useful with it. YouTube’s terms allow watching and accessing content for personal use. Since Relic isn’t downloading the video or re-uploading it elsewhere, it’s generally fine. It’s similar to how one might use the “Open transcript” feature on YouTube to manually skim a video – Relic is just automating that and summarizing. So, no, you won’t get in trouble for summarizing a video you have access to. In fact, many content creators appreciate summaries because it can attract viewers who are scanning. That said, obviously the summary is for your personal use/learning. If you plan to publish the summary, proper credit to the source video is good practice. But for note-taking or learning purposes, you’re squarely in fair use territory. From a technical standpoint, Relic’s extension just reads the page like you would; it’s not hacking anything. So feel confident using it on YouTube – it’s a legit use of the platform’s provided data (transcripts) to enhance your understanding！