Prosey

Prosey is a CLI tool to download and display video transcriptions from YouTube, so you can get the information you're looking for without wasting hours.

The main use cases are:

• Summarize a YouTube video and display it in the CLI with a single command (quicker).
• Read video captions, formatted and organized in chapters like the original video (often needs more time).

Both uses need an AI assistant on your system (default: opencode, use prosey config to configure your own).

If we detect a syntax highlighter on your system, you'll get a nice colored output.

Prosey can also output or store the native json format verbatim.

Features

Feature	Description
💡  Summarize	Fetch and summarize a video transcription
📖  Read	Fetch and display the transcript formatted in Markdown
💬  Copy	Copy a summary to the clipboard, ready to paste into a web chat
📋  Transcript download	Fetch YouTube transcripts as plain text or JSON verbatim
🤖  AI summarization	Pipe transcripts to any AI agent (opencode, Claude, Copilot, Codex)
🎨  Smart pager	Automatic syntax highlighting if bat, glow or mdcat are installed (or configure your own pager)
🛠️  Customization	Use prosey config to access and edit your configuration / customize the prompts
💾  Disk caching	Transcripts and summaries are cached on disk for instant re-read
📄  Supported formats	Plain text and JSON

Quickstart

Try it out immediately with npx:

npx @tacone/prosey 771PQEDeRmw
npx @tacone/prosey https://youtu.be/771PQEDeRmw --lang es -o transcript.txt

Install

Install globally with your favorite package manager:

npm install -g @tacone/prosey
# or
yarn global add @tacone/prosey
# or
pnpm add -g @tacone/prosey
# or
bun install -g @tacone/prosey

Then use it anywhere:

prosey 771PQEDeRmw

From Source

Uses Bun for development — scripts, package management, and running the TypeScript source directly.

git clone https://github.com/tacone/prosey.git
cd prosey
bun install
bun run start -- 771PQEDeRmw

Usage

prosey [options] <video controls-url-or-id>
prosey read [options] <video controls-url-or-id>
prosey info [options] <video controls-url-or-id>
prosey summarize [options] <video controls-url-or-id>
prosey copy [--question <text>] <folder>
prosey index
prosey render
prosey config
prosey help

summarize is the default command, so prosey <id> runs the AI summarizer. Use prosey read <id> to download and print a richly formatted transcript.

The summarize command fetches a transcript, prepends the prompt from the [summarize] config section, and pipes the result to the configured AI command.

The read command downloads the transcript and prints it to stdout (plain text, markdown, or JSON). This is useful when you don't need AI processing.

The info command shows video metadata (title, channel, duration, views).

The index command rebuilds the document index and opens it in the browser. The index lists every summary and transcription stored in the data directory and is automatically rebuilt after each summarize/transcribe run. Clicking the Prosey logo on any content page navigates back to it.

The render command regenerates every HTML page from the cached markdown (no network or AI processing) and rewrites the index.

The copy command copies a document's summary to the clipboard, ready to be pasted into a web chat. It takes the folder name printed at the end of the last run (or a full path); --question appends your question after the summary, separated by two blank lines. Only summaries can be copied — a transcript-only folder is an error.

Summary pages carry a Copy link on the meta line, right of the reading time: it puts the summary on the clipboard, ready to paste into a web chat.

The config command opens your config file in $EDITOR for editing. If $EDITOR is not set, the config file path is printed.

The help command shows the help message, same as --help.

Examples

# Summarize (AI summary + formatting + syntax highlighting)
prosey 771PQEDeRmw

# Summarize (same as above)
prosey summarize 771PQEDeRmw

# Transcribe (AI summary + formatting + syntax highlighting)
prosey read 771PQEDeRmw

# Show video metadata
prosey info 771PQEDeRmw

# Edit config in $EDITOR
prosey config

# List available languages
prosey read https://youtu.be/771PQEDeRmw --list

# Specify language
prosey read https://youtu.be/771PQEDeRmw --lang es

# Display JSON (no AI transcription)
prosey read 771PQEDeRmw

# Display plain text (no AI transcription)
prosey read 771PQEDeRmw

# Save transcript to file
prosey read 771PQEDeRmw -o transcript.txt

Options