Lance Whitney / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The free TLDW uses AI to find key moments in a YouTube video.
- You don’t have to watch an entire video just to catch one moment.
- You can also chat with the AI to ask questions about the video.
Ever had to watch a lengthy YouTube video just to find a specific moment? If only there were some way to cut to the chase so you wouldn’t have to go through the entire video. That’s the idea behind a new and free AI-based tool created by a trio of designers and developers.
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TLDW (Too Long; Didn’t Watch) analyzes YouTube videos and highlights key moments from them. The tool displays links to each key moment so you can quickly jump to any of them and watch just the specific clip. A transcript shows you the text of the spoken audio; selecting a specific moment highlights its text in the transcript. Best of all, you can chat with the built-in AI to ask specific questions about the video.
Getting started with TLDW
Browse to YouTube and open a video you want analyzed. Copy the URL for the video. Head to the TLDW website and paste the URL into the text field. Choose whether you want the analysis to be Smart or Fast. The Smart mode uses a more intelligent model with higher quality but takes time to generate. The Fast mode isn’t quite as smart but takes less time to finish.
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The results break down the video into different categories or topics. Selecting a specific category displays all its key moments and shows how long each clip runs. Click any key moment to watch that section in the video.
You can then turn to the transcript to view the spoken audio and the chat area to strike up a conversation about the video. You’re also able to highlight any text in the transcript or chat to save it as a note. Click your account icon at the upper right to access past videos and key moments, as well as your notes.
TLDW is free to use; however, you get only a couple of tries before it prompts you to set up an account. After creating an account, you’re able to use the tool up to five times per day.
My experience with TLDW
I tried TLDW with a few different YouTube videos. One was of famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke offering predictions of the future. Another was a look at the film “The Cat and the Canary,” a silent horror movie produced at Universal in 1927. A third served up 20 things you didn’t know about Monty Python.
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With the Arthur C. Clarke video, I was able to zero in on a specific clip in which he spoke about suspended animation as the key to time travel. In the case of the Monty Python video, one key moment explained how a programmer adopted the word spam based on a famous sketch of the British comedy troupe.
I especially liked the chat function, as I was able to ask relevant questions, to which the AI provided comprehensive answers. I could even highlight specific text from the transcript and tell the AI to explain it. Doing so generated further interesting questions that I could pose.
What is TLDW’s story?
I chatted by email with developer Zara Zhang, who built the tool with Samuel Zhang, a computer science student, and Yiqi Yan as the designer.
To analyze videos on YouTube, TLDW uses Google Gemini as its LLM (large language model). The tool grabs the video transcript and then uses AI to extract the most insightful or prominent moments. To determine those key moments, the AI uses its own judgment based on the model and the prompt. But typically, it looks at different opinions expressed in the video, refreshing insights, and memorable anecdotes.
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Zhang told me that the tool was inspired by the team’s own pain points when trying to learn from lengthy YouTube videos.
“I have found long YouTube videos to be the best resources to learn about AI, but many people don’t have the attention span to sit through long videos from start to finish,” Zhang said. “Currently, many people get AI to generate a text summary of the video, but we believe that’s not a good approach. Video is meant to be consumed as video; there is a lot of visual information (e.g., product demos, slides, speaker’s vibes and dynamics), which are lost when you convert video to text.”
Instead, TLDW quickly jumps to the best parts of a video. And even though the tool provides a transcript of the video, Zhang said that the team believes personalized highlight reels are a better solution than a generic text summary.
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“Also, when I’m watching technical videos, I often want the technical jargon explained in context, and copying and pasting into Google or Perplexity was cumbersome,” Zhang added. “So we built a feature where users can select any term in the transcript, and AI will explain it in context.”
Capturing notes about the video is also a huge benefit. Instead of having to pause, rewind, and type out a quote manually, you can just select text in the transcript and save it as a note.
What does the future hold?
“We plan to make it a lot more personalized and also make it easier to access (e.g., adding a browser extension to allow people to save YouTube videos to TLDW easily),” Zhang explained. “We are planning on adding a ‘share quote’ feature so people can easily share video quotes to social media as images.”
