About Distill
Distill is an AI-powered tool that helps you grasp the key points of any YouTube video without watching the whole thing.
What is Distill?
Millions of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. Lectures, interviews, and documentaries contain valuable information — but most people never find the time to watch them in full.
Distill takes a single YouTube URL and distills the video's core content into a concise, readable summary. No sign-up, no download, completely free.
Features
Quick Summary
Get 3–5 bullet points covering the most important ideas. Understand the gist of a video in under a minute.
Detailed Chapter Breakdown
The video is divided into logical chapters, each with a concise summary. Perfect for navigating long-form content.
Keyword Extraction
Extract the 10 most important keywords and concepts from the video, each with a brief explanation. Great for quickly learning a new topic.
How It Works
- You paste a YouTube URL. Distill fetches the video's public caption data via the YouTube Data API.
- The caption text is passed to Anthropic's Claude AI to generate a summary.
- The summary is displayed on screen.
Videos without captions may not be supported. Raw caption data is never stored on our servers. AI-generated summaries may be cached for up to 24 hours for performance, then automatically deleted.
Usage Guidelines
- Only public YouTube videos are supported. Private or age-restricted videos are not.
- Videos with captions produce the most accurate results.
- For very long videos, only the first ~30,000 characters of captions (roughly 30–60 minutes) are processed.
- Requests are limited to 5 per minute per IP address.
- AI summaries are for reference only and may not perfectly reflect the original video.
- Videos containing adult content, hate speech, or harmful information cannot be summarized.
Distill is not affiliated with YouTube, Google, or Anthropic. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC. Summaries are AI-generated and do not represent the official position of any video creator.