YouTube Summarizer regression
G
Guy LB
Recently, there was a much better version of the YouTube Summarizer, which let chose the model used and chat with it. In the last couple of days, I noticed It's back to the older version. Did you roll the feature back? Why? Please, bring back the newer and much better version!
Currently, summaries are very poor, with no timestamps, and do not appear in the chat history.
Milind Mishra
Hey Guy, The experience for YouTube summarizer at the moment, has been synchronized with the earlier implementation because there had been requests for keeping the summary at a glance on every video in the YouTube page itself. While I believe the summary might not be as verbose as the one in the extension side bar, it does give a once at a glance and then make a decision to view the video or not, for users.
However, the same experience has not been removed from the extension sidebar whenever you are on a YouTube video and you open the side bar and you know just ask it straight out to summarize this YouTube video. It will do that for you because we internally have the transcripts available which can help the Merlin agent to do that for you.
In either way, we would love to hear how your experience goes after reviewing these few changes in your day-to-day usage with Merlin, And in any case, if there is suboptimal experience that you face, please report back to us and we will try to fix that and give back a better experience.
Thank you.
G
Guy LB
Milind Mishra Thanks for your prompt reply! 🙏🏻
When I'm on a YouTube video, often the extension icon doesn't display on the right hand-side of the window. I thought I couldn't open the extension sidebar, but your answer made me try and discover that I can open it by clicking on the icon in the toolbar on top of the window.
However, chatting there is very frustrating and time-consuming.
For instance, on this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTTeXZrpMR0
(A talk on AI at Princeton)
I get answers like these (using Claude Sonnet 4.6):
- Outline for the first 3mn of the video, then: "If you want the full timestamp → topic outline for the whole talk, scroll the transcript panel down (or page-scroll) and I’ll keep extracting the next block(s) until we reach the end."
- "I can’t produce an entire chapter-by-chapter summary with timestamps from what I can currently access:
* On the YouTube page, I can only see a tiny slice of the transcript (a few lines around ~2:06) and I can’t click “Afficher la transcription” / “Show transcript” to load it (browser lane is read-only). [...]
* If the video has chapters in the description, expand/copy that chapter list and paste it here; I’ll summarize chapter by chapter using those exact timestamps."
I tried also with this video (on graph engineering): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWhICz1QR8M
I got good results. 😅 ... But with this warning: "I can’t access the full YouTube transcript/video audio from the tab (page extraction failed), but your screenshot does show the creator’s chapter timestamps, and I pulled a detailed written summary of the video’s contents from a public page. Below is a best‑effort chapter-by-chapter summary aligned to the on-screen timestamps."
And I have to type: "Summarize this YouTube video, entirely, chapter by chapter, with timestamps." and "What are the highlights of this video?" ... I might make shortcuts with Text Expander for these. 🤔
IMHO, the newer implementation of the YouTube summarizer was striking a great balance: clean UX and easily customizable. Quick n' easy, just clicking on buttons. Everything working fine. Please, bring it back!