I’m thinking about how to improve LearnFromYouTube. It’s my second product.
At first, I just wanted to make a little YouTube Transcript Download tool. Halfway through, I felt it wasn’t that interesting—why not go one step further and build richer information extraction based on the transcript?
That led to an eight-part Learning Report, covering everything from Summary, Key Takeaway, and Q&A to Transcript.
Although tools like NotebookLM can also achieve something similar, this kind of automation is still more convenient.
I call LearnFromYouTube an AI summary product. Recently, I’ve found that this kind of product has a fatal bug:
For the same content, different people may care about completely different things. For example, in the conversation between Luo Yonghao and Tim, I’m interested in these parts, while the parts that resonate with you may be those.
When you use summary products deeply, you realize they can’t meet your expectations; what they output are all very bland conclusions. It looks like it saves effort, but in fact, a lot of the time it doesn’t extract the real point.
By contrast, if you watch it yourself and then distill it on your own, the conclusions you draw may be completely different from what AI gives you.
The positioning of AI summary products is very similar to content like “watch a movie in 3 minutes.”
But the problem is that what AI summarizes is not film or TV drama, but relatively deep long-form content, such as a two- or three-hour podcast, or a long article of ten thousand-plus characters.
When dealing with content like this, how do you summarize it accurately? How can the output summary and takeaway provide the same feeling as “watching a movie in 3 minutes”?
How do you get to 80 points? Or is it at most 60 points, with limited value?
If this form can only get to 60 points, how should the product evolve?
So, even though they’re both about summaries and takeaways, entertainment content and learning content can’t be treated the same.
I’m still too presumptuous when it comes to making products.