Summarize YouTube Transcripts with Fetchworks & GPT-4o (n8n)

Summarize Any YouTube Video in Minutes—Using Fetchworks & GPT-4o in n8n

Paste a YouTube URL and this n8n workflow will fetch the video transcript with Fetchworks (via Apify) and generate a crisp 5-bullet summary—plus a recommendation on who should watch it.

What this workflow does

• Manual start: You run the workflow when you’re ready to summarize a specific video.
• Set your target URL: Provide the YouTube video link you want summarized.
• Fetch the transcript: The workflow uses the Fetchworks YouTube Transcripts integration to retrieve the transcript text from YouTube (powered by the fetchworks/youtube-transcript-scraper actor).
• Generate summary with OpenAI: The transcript and the video title are sent to OpenAI (using GPT-4o in this workflow) to produce:
  • A 5-bullet summary
  • A who-should-watch line
• Deliver a quick decision: Get an easy “should I watch this?” outcome without reading the full transcript.

Use cases

• SaaS operators: Turn product and marketing YouTube videos into actionable takeaways for your team.
• Automation engineers: Summarize technical talks and documentation walkthroughs to quickly track what matters.
• Content research: Review interviews or expert sessions and decide which ones deserve full viewing time.

Technical details

• Fetchworks via Apify: Requires an Apify account and API token; the Fetchworks node runs fetchworks/youtube-transcript-scraper (about $2 per 1k transcripts; Apify free tier works for testing).
• OpenAI credentials: Add your OpenAI API key and select the model for the summarization step (GPT-4o here; you can swap in another LLM node).
• n8n setup: Install the n8n-nodes-fetchworks community node, create/select a Fetchworks API credential, and replace the example YouTube URL with your target link.