AI Skills
Packaged instructions that teach Claude (or any AI tool that supports Agent Skills) how to call the YouTube Transcript API on your behalf - fetch a transcript, search YouTube, or pull a playlist, just by asking in plain English. You still need an API key from your dashboard (free tier included, no card required).
New to this? Our step-by-step guide covers every way to get YouTube transcripts into Claude, including the connector and MCP server: How to get a YouTube transcript into Claude.
YouTube Transcript
FreeFetch a video's transcript, search YouTube (globally or a channel), resolve a channel handle, or list a playlist's videos - all via the getyoutubetranscript.com API.
Triggers on
- "Get the transcript for this YouTube video"
- "Summarize this YouTube video" (fetches the transcript first)
- "Search YouTube for ..."
- "What videos are in this playlist?"
Install
Claude Code
Unzip into your skills folder, then restart Claude Code (or start a new session):
unzip youtube-transcript-skill.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/Claude.ai / Claude Desktop
Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, then select the downloaded .zip file directly - no need to unzip it yourself.
Set your API key
The skill looks for your key in the YOUTUBE_TRANSCRIPT_API_KEY environment variable. Get a free key from your dashboard first, then:
export YOUTUBE_TRANSCRIPT_API_KEY="sk_live_..."If it's not set, the skill will just ask you for a key in the conversation instead.
