Hi HN — I built QuickSummarize, an open-source Chrome extension for working with YouTube videos through captions.
The core idea is to make video Q&A transcript-first instead of treating a one-time summary as the whole memory.
Current workflow:
- summary
- transcript-first chat
- timeline browsing
- subtitle export
It runs in the Chrome side panel and currently focuses on YouTube.
A few implementation choices I cared about:
- transcript is the main source of truth for follow-up questions
- bring-your-own API instead of another hosted subscription
- support for both OpenAI-compatible APIs and Anthropic-style APIs
- English / Chinese UI
Still early, but it already feels more useful to me than the usual one-shot “summarize this video” flow.
Would especially love feedback on:
- whether transcript-first chat is actually the right UX
- how people think about long-video memory/retrieval
- caption reliability edge cases