🎬 Summarize YouTube videos with GPT-4o-mini and Apify transcripts
⚡ 1,448 views · 🎬 Content Creation & Video
💡 Pro Tip — YouTube’s API quotas can be a bottleneck when you’re pulling data at scale. ScraperNode is a community node with dedicated scrapers for channels, videos, and comments — no quota limits, just structured data.
Description
This workflow contains community nodes that are only compatible with the self-hosted version of n8n.
This workflow automates summarizing YouTube videos by accepting a YouTube URL via a form, fetching the video transcript using Apify, and then generating a concise summary with OpenAI GPT.
Setup Instructions
Prerequisites:
- Apify account with access to the YouTube Transcript actor.
- OpenAI API key (for GPT-4o-mini model).
- n8n instance with the Apify and OpenAI credentials configured.
Configuration Steps
Apify Setup:
- Configure Apify API credentials in the Apify node.
- Ensure the YouTube Transcript actor ID (1s7eXiaukVuOr4Ueg) is correct.
OpenAI Setup:
- Add your OpenAI API key in the OpenAI Chat Model node.
- Confirm model selection is set to gpt-4o-mini.
Customization
- Modify form field to accept additional inputs if needed.
- Adjust Apify actor input JSON in the Payload node for extra metadata extraction.
- Customize the summarization options to tweak summary length or style.
- Change OpenAI prompt or model parameters in the OpenAI Chat Model node for different output quality or tone.
Steps
1. On Form Submission
- Node: Form Trigger
- Purpose: Collect the YouTube video URL from the user via a web form.
2. Prepare Payload
- Node: Set
- Purpose: Format the YouTube URL and options into the JSON payload for Apify input.
3. Fetch Transcript
- Node: Apify
- Purpose: Run the YouTube Transcript actor to retrieve video captions and metadata.
4. Extract Captions
- Purpose: Isolate the captions field from the Apify response for processing.
5. Summarize Transcript
- Purpose: Generate a concise summary of the video captions.
🔗 Nodes Used
Summarization Chain, OpenAI Chat Model, n8n Form Trigger
📥 Import
Download workflow.json and import into n8n:
Workflow menu → Import from File