Telegram bot for Youtube learners: taking notes with subtitles
Hi guys! I’m a typical lifelong learner. I’m constantly studying smth ranging from emotinal intelligence to NodeJs. In the last few years my content consuming process mostly moved to Youtube. And recently I’ve decided to make my workflow as smooth as possible. So I’ve created a Telegram bot helping me to take notes why watching YT videos. I hope you will also like it.
My typical Youtube learning workflow
My typical workflow while studying particular video includes following stages:
1. Fast aquaintance + timestamping. Initially I watch video at an accelerated rate (usually 1,5x). During this process I’m saving timestamps for each video moment, which I consider as meaningful. Usually I do it from my phone on the go or in a public transport. My “time-markers” go straight to Telegram (“Saved messages”). To save them I use “out of the box” Telegram feature: sending a reply to Youtube video link message with timecode and Telegram automatically turns reply into the timepointed link.
2. Taking notes by timestamps. Finally, when I’m getting home, I go through all timestamps, review the video in the corresponding timepoints to take notes into Obsidian (the best ever note taking app!!!)
This approach is OK in general. However, I found that for long-duration videos it would be very handy to save a small piece of subtitles, which relates to the particular timestamp. This feature gives us 3 benefits:
a. After watching the video and saving timestamps you can take notes mostly without any need to launch the video. That extremely speeds up the process.
b. You can prioritize your note taking process, what is extremelly valuable when your have to go through a several-hour video and have limited amount of time. Having the “whole picture” (after watching the complete video), you can even exclude several timestamps, which turn to be not as crucial as it seemed on the first watch.
c. You can quickly go through your “info-markers” to get back in the key content ideas even without taking notes of the video.
Having this in mind, I decided to create Telegram bot, which is able to pull out subtitles for the particular video timepoint and collect all these runtime “marks” to MD and pdf files.
The new scenario
Now I’m using ViMarker bot for marking Youtube video key moments while watching. The scenario is as following:
1. I send YT video link to the bot:
2. Then I send messages with timestamps formatted as following: “mm” (minutes), “mm:ss” (minutes seconds) or “hh:mm:ss” (hours minutes seconds). Bot turns timestamps into links with timepoints and save with subtitles. Right after the timestamp (in the same message) you can also add any text. Bot will recognize it as your comment related to the particular timecode:
I can also send comments and pictures which are not related to the concrete timepoint.
3. When I’m done watching one or several vides, I just click “Collect all” button. Bot will pack the markers with subtitles and comments to pdf and MD files, which I can download right away.
And I save MD files right to my Obsidian:
More features
a. Bot also accepting Youtube links with timepoint (which is possible to copy with Youtube desktop web version): `https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID?t=TIME` . After receiving the link bot will extract it’s subtitles right away.
b. Send /all command to extract all subtitles for the current video.
c. !UPDATE! (19.05.22): Now you can extract screenshot for particular video timepoint along with subtitles. Just add ‘s’ character after the timecode (without space). Very handy when need to take screenshot of graph or diagram displayed on the video. The feature is also available for videos without subtitles.
To end up with
Just several points to end up with:
1. I’m planning to make bot as good as possible to satisfy Youtube learner needs. If you have any ideas on new features to add to the bot, just let me know. Also please notify me about bugs (if you meet them).
2. If bot is not responding to your input, just restart it with `/start` command
3. If you want to track bot updates and vote for feature priority, please follow this TG channel.
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