YouAskTube

YouAskTube is a web app for asking a YouTube video questions instead of watching all of it. Paste a link and it pulls the full transcript, then opens a chat that knows the video. Every answer cites the exact moment it came from, so you can jump to the timestamp and check it yourself. It exists for the moment when a 40-minute talk probably contains the one detail you need and you'd rather not scrub through it looking. The chat is built on top of that transcript, which is where the citations come from.

There are two ways in. The obvious one is pasting a YouTube link on the homepage. The quicker one is the URL trick the service is named after. While you're watching a video, type the word ask into the address bar so youtube.com becomes youasktube.com, and the same video opens in the chat. There's no account needed for that. Anonymous users get a small daily allowance, and the homepage also lists trending videos if you want to try it on something without hunting for a link first. Once a video is loaded you get the transcript in full alongside the chat. Ask what the speaker said about a specific topic, ask for a summary of one section, or ask where a particular claim was made, and the answer arrives with a citation to the moment in the video. That citation is the useful part. A summary you can't verify is just another opinion, but a summary with timestamps lets you confirm it in seconds and quote it with confidence.

The transcript on its own is worth having. It's the full text, so you can search it in the browser, copy a passage into your notes, or read the whole thing in a fraction of the runtime. The chat sits beside it rather than replacing it, which means when an answer cites a moment you can read the surrounding lines to make sure the context matches, then click through to the video if you want to hear how it was said. For a lecture or a long interview that's often the whole job done without pressing play.

Compared with the run of AI video summarizers, the difference is scope and candour. It doesn't try to be a note-taking suite or a browser extension with a dozen features. It does one thing, question and answer over a transcript with citations, and it tells you in its terms exactly which providers and models are involved, which is rare. The limits are the price of that focus. A Max plan's thirty questions and fifteen videos a day is plenty for personal use and not enough for a team, and the site doesn't describe an API for building on top of it.

The terms of service are unusually clear about what runs underneath. Transcripts come from third-party providers, Supadata first and TranscriptAPI as a fallback. The answering model is named as GPT-5.6 Luna from OpenAI, with GLM-5.2 from Z.ai as a fallback, both reached through OpenRouter. The service says it stores no more than the transcript text and minimal video metadata, and signed-in users can delete individual conversations, wipe all of them, or turn off saving for future chats altogether. There's a security contact published at the standard well-known address too, which is more than many small tools bother with.

It fits students working through recorded lectures, researchers checking what a podcast guest actually said, journalists confirming a quote before they use it, and anyone who reads faster than they watch. It's run by BitVibe Labs, a Greece-based sole trader, and it's careful to say it isn't affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with YouTube or Google. What makes it different is friction, or the lack of it. Plenty of tools summarize videos, but most want an account before they do anything. Here the anonymous path works from the address bar, and the citations turn the output into something you can check rather than something you have to trust. The trade-offs follow from the size of the operation. Daily caps are modest even on the top plan, answers are only as good as the transcript the providers return, and there's no choosing the model, you get the primary or the fallback.

Access is freemium with limits counted per UTC day. Anonymous use allows roughly two questions and one video a day. A free account raises that to four questions and two videos. Pro is $5 a month for ten questions and five videos, and Max is $10 a month for thirty questions and fifteen videos, both as auto-renewing subscriptions. Contact is hello@bitvibelabs.com, with a separate address for copyright notices listed in the terms. Limits reset each UTC day rather than each month, so a heavy day of research doesn't borrow from the rest of the week, and there's no annual commitment described, just the monthly auto-renewal.