YouTube Research Assistant

Fetch transcripts from YouTube videos to provide structured multilingual summaries, Q&A, deep dives

Before installing, consider these points: (1) The skill runs yt-dlp as a subprocess which will make network requests to YouTube to fetch subtitles — ensure you are comfortable with that behavior and with yt-dlp being present on the host. (2) Transcripts and a small session/index file are stored locally under ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/youtube-research-assistant/data for up to 24 hours; remove them if you need longer retention control. (3) The script calls yt-dlp with --no-check-certificates, which disables TLS certificate validation — review/modify that flag if you want stricter network security. (4) The SKILL.md mandates that all answers must come only from transcripts; the script enforces retrieving chunks but translation/language-detection is not implemented in the script itself — the agent will need to handle that. (5) As with any skill that executes subprocesses and writes files, only install if you trust the skill source; you can inspect/modify scripts locally before enabling. If you want tighter guarantees, request the author remove --no-check-certificates and add optional config to change the data directory or retention period.

Type: OpenClaw Skill Name: youtube-research-assistant Version: 5.0.1 The 'youtube-research-assistant' skill is a legitimate tool designed to fetch and query YouTube transcripts. The Python script `get_transcript.py` uses `yt-dlp` safely by passing arguments as a list to `subprocess.Popen` (avoiding shell injection) and employs strict regex validation for video IDs to prevent path traversal. The `SKILL.md` file contains defensive instructions to prevent AI hallucination and explicitly restricts network activity to transcript fetching, with all data stored locally in the user's home directory.