Daily
Summarise new videos in a playlist every day
Each day, new videos added to a playlist you follow are summarised in a sheet, and you get a short email with the list.
- Runs
- Daily
- Apps
- Google Sheets, YouTube
- AI
- Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
- Access
- YouTube API key; Sheets edit
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every morning, check my Research playlist for videos I haven't logged yet. Summarise each one with AI from its description, add it to my Watch Log sheet and email me the list.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
A marketing lead follows a dozen industry channels and saves interesting talks to a playlist to watch later. Later rarely comes. The playlist grows to sixty videos and nobody on the team knows which ones are worth an hour.
A short summary of each new video, kept in a shared sheet, lets the team decide what to watch and gives them a searchable log of everything they have saved.
What you get out of it
Decide what is worth watching
A few lines on each video show whether it is worth the hour before anyone presses play.
A shared research log
The whole team can search the sheet for a topic and find the right talk months later.
Nothing is logged twice
Videos already in the sheet are skipped, so the log stays clean.
A daily nudge
The morning email lists what was added, which keeps the playlist from becoming a graveyard.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Every morning, ClickRuntime lists the videos in the playlist you chose.
It checks your Watch Log sheet and skips any video already listed there.
For each new video, AI writes a short summary from its title and description.
Each video is added to the sheet with its link and summary, and you get an email listing them.
Before it runs live
- Connect your Google Sheets account and pick the spreadsheets it may use
- Connect YouTube
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
- Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
- Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
- Combine it with other Google Sheets and YouTube steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from clickruntime import on_trigger, http, credentials, ai, notify
YT = "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3"
def yt(path, **params):
return http.get(f"{YT}/{path}", params={**params, "key": credentials.secret("YOUTUBE_API_KEY")}).json().get("items", [])
def api(name, version):
return build(name, version, credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")), cache_discovery=False)
SHEET_ID, PLAYLIST = "your-spreadsheet-id", "PLxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
@on_trigger
def run(event):
sheet = api("sheets", "v4").spreadsheets().values()
logged = {r[0] for r in sheet.get(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range="Watch Log!A2:A").execute().get("values", []) if r}
ids = [i["contentDetails"]["videoId"] for i in yt("playlistItems", part="contentDetails", playlistId=PLAYLIST, maxResults=50)]
new = [i for i in ids if i not in logged]
if not new:
return {"logged": 0}
rows = []
for v in yt("videos", part="snippet", id=",".join(new)):
s = v["snippet"]
summary = ai.generate(f"{s['title']}\n\n{s['description'][:3000]}", system="Summarise this video in 3 sentences for a busy marketer.",
max_output_tokens=150).text.strip()
rows.append([v["id"], s["title"], s["channelTitle"], f"https://youtu.be/{v['id']}", summary])
sheet.append(spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, range="Watch Log!A:E", valueInputOption="RAW", body={"values": rows}).execute()
notify.email_me(f"{len(rows)} new videos summarised", "\n\n".join(f"{r[1]} ({r[2]})\n{r[4]}\n{r[3]}" for r in rows))
return {"logged": len(rows)}FAQ
Common questions
Does it watch the whole video?
Can it follow more than one playlist?
What if nothing new was added?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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