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Daily

Get a daily digest of a playlist's new videos

New additions to a playlist are summarised in one email so you know which to watch.

Runs
Daily
Apps
YouTube
AI
Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
Access
youtube.readonly

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every day at 7am, summarise the videos added to my 'Research' playlist in the last day and email me.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

Playlists are often used as reading lists. A team follows a conference playlist with forty talks, a student follows a lecture series, a founder follows a competitor's channel playlist. New videos get added at random times, and unless someone opens the playlist, they go unnoticed for weeks, long after the topic was timely.

Every day, the playlist is checked, and videos added since the previous run are identified using stored state. ClickRuntime's built-in AI writes a short summary of each from its description, and one email lists the new videos with their summaries and links.

People tracking a conference, a course or a research topic on YouTube will find it a good way to keep up without watching everything. The email lets a busy person keep up with a series without opening YouTube.

What you get out of it

  • New videos are noticed quickly

    A daily email means you hear about a new talk the day it appears, which matters when the topic is current or the content is time-limited. Early awareness is what makes a conference talk or a news video still useful.

  • You decide what is worth watching

    A two-sentence summary helps you choose between a 90-minute keynote and a 10-minute demo, so your viewing time goes to what is useful. Choosing well saves hours, because most people cannot watch everything that gets posted.

  • Teams can share one digest

    Forwarding the email gives everyone the same list, so colleagues do not each have to watch the playlist or hear about videos second-hand. A shared email keeps the group on the same page without another meeting.

  • It works for other people's playlists

    You do not need to own the playlist, so you can follow a conference or a competitor's curated list without subscribing to the entire channel. That makes it a quiet way to track a competitor's published series.

  • Nothing repeats

    Stored state ensures each video appears in one digest only, so you can trust that every item in the email is genuinely new. Because each video appears once, you never wonder whether you already read about it.

How it works

What happens, step by step

  1. Once a day, ClickRuntime checks the YouTube playlist you chose for videos added since the last check.

  2. It skips any video it has already told you about.

  3. AI reads each new video's description and writes one line on what it covers.

  4. You get one email with the numbered summaries and the links, so you can pick what to watch.

Before it runs live

  • Connect YouTube

What you get

RunsDaily
Get a daily digest of a playlist's new videostoday, 9:00Succeeded
Email · 3 new in your playlist1. A walkthrough of Postgres row-level security with a multi-tenant example. 2. How Acme moved its search to a vector index, and what it cost.

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.
  • 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 YouTube steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.
daily_summary_of_new_playlist_videos.pyexample
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, state, ai, notify, report_fetched

YT = "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3"
PLAYLIST_ID = "PLxxxxxxxx"

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    h = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.connection('google', 'work')}"}
    items = http.get(f"{YT}/playlistItems", headers=h, params={"part": "contentDetails", "playlistId": PLAYLIST_ID, "maxResults": 50}).json()["items"]
    seen = state.get("seen") or []
    new = [i["contentDetails"]["videoId"] for i in items if i["contentDetails"]["videoId"] not in seen]
    report_fetched(len(new))
    if not new:
        return {"summary": "Nothing new"}
    videos = http.get(f"{YT}/videos", headers=h, params={"part": "snippet", "id": ",".join(new)}).json()["items"]
    text = "\n\n".join(f"{i}. {v['snippet']['title']}\n{v['snippet']['description'][:800]}" for i, v in enumerate(videos, 1))
    summary = ai.generate(text, system="For each numbered video, write one line on what it covers.", max_output_tokens=500).text
    links = "\n".join(f"https://youtu.be/{v['id']}" for v in videos)
    state.set("seen", (seen + new)[-1000:])
    notify.email_me(f"{len(videos)} new in your playlist", f"{summary}\n\n{links}")
    return {"new": len(videos)}

FAQ

Common questions

Does it summarise using the video's captions?
This version summarises from the video's title and description, which is quicker and does not depend on captions. If descriptions are short, the summary will be brief, and your AI assistant can add caption-based summaries if you need more detail.
What if no videos were added that day?
Then there is nothing to report, so the email is skipped or sent as a one-line note, as you prefer. Most people choose to skip it so the inbox only shows days with something worth reading.
Can it watch more than one playlist?
Yes. You can list several playlist IDs, and the digest groups new videos under each playlist title. This suits teams following a few series at once, such as separate playlists for different conference tracks. The digest then has one clear section per list.
What permissions does it need?
youtube.readonly. Nothing else in your accounts is used.
Does it need AI?
Yes. It uses ClickRuntime's built-in AI, so you don't need an OpenAI or Anthropic key. Every plan includes a monthly AI allowance.
How many runs does it use?
One run each time it runs (daily). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.
Can I change how it works?
Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

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