summarize

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Summarize URLs or files with the summarize CLI (web, PDFs, images, audio, YouTube).

⭐3.1kstars🔀474forks📁View on GitHub🕐Updated Jan 11, 2026
[Summarization]

When & Why to Use This Skill

This Claude skill provides a high-performance CLI tool designed to summarize and extract text from URLs, YouTube videos, podcasts, and local files. By integrating multiple LLM providers like Gemini and OpenAI, it allows users to quickly digest complex information from diverse media formats including PDFs, images, and audio, significantly enhancing research efficiency and information consumption.

Use Cases

  • Web Content Research: Rapidly summarize long-form articles, blog posts, and news reports to identify key takeaways without manual reading.
  • YouTube Video Insights: Extract transcripts and generate concise summaries for educational videos, webinars, or tutorials to save viewing time.
  • Multi-modal Document Processing: Process local files such as PDFs, audio recordings, and images to distill essential information into actionable notes.
  • Automated Information Triage: Use CLI commands to batch-process multiple links or documents, streamlining the workflow for knowledge workers and researchers.
namesummarize
descriptionSummarize or extract text/transcripts from URLs, podcasts, and local files (great fallback for “transcribe this YouTube/video”).
homepagehttps://summarize.sh
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Summarize

Fast CLI to summarize URLs, local files, and YouTube links.

When to use (trigger phrases)

Use this skill immediately when the user asks any of:

  • “use summarize.sh”
  • “what’s this link/video about?”
  • “summarize this URL/article”
  • “transcribe this YouTube/video” (best-effort transcript extraction; no yt-dlp needed)

Quick start

summarize "https://example.com" --model google/gemini-3-flash-preview
summarize "/path/to/file.pdf" --model google/gemini-3-flash-preview
summarize "https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ" --youtube auto

YouTube: summary vs transcript

Best-effort transcript (URLs only):

summarize "https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ" --youtube auto --extract-only

If the user asked for a transcript but it’s huge, return a tight summary first, then ask which section/time range to expand.

Model + keys

Set the API key for your chosen provider:

  • OpenAI: OPENAI_API_KEY
  • Anthropic: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
  • xAI: XAI_API_KEY
  • Google: GEMINI_API_KEY (aliases: GOOGLE_GENERATIVE_AI_API_KEY, GOOGLE_API_KEY)

Default model is google/gemini-3-flash-preview if none is set.

Useful flags

  • --length short|medium|long|xl|xxl|<chars>
  • --max-output-tokens <count>
  • --extract-only (URLs only)
  • --json (machine readable)
  • --firecrawl auto|off|always (fallback extraction)
  • --youtube auto (Apify fallback if APIFY_API_TOKEN set)

Config

Optional config file: ~/.summarize/config.json

{ "model": "openai/gpt-5.2" }

Optional services:

  • FIRECRAWL_API_KEY for blocked sites
  • APIFY_API_TOKEN for YouTube fallback