AI YouTube
Paraphraser
Web App
- STACK: NextJS, Express
- YEAR: 2023
- USERS: >100
- AI Integration
- Full Stack App Development
- Next.js Serverless Functions
- Express.js Backend
- API Development
- Content Summarization
YouTube Paraphraser is a lightweight AI-powered tool built to summarize YouTube videos into concise, paraphrased text. Users input a YouTube URL and receive a clean summary powered by a backend processing pipeline. The web client was developed with a minimal JavaScript stack for speed and accessibility, and a companion Chrome Extension was released to make summarizing videos even faster—removing the need to visit the site directly. The tool was designed for simplicity, with the goal of helping users quickly extract value from video content without watching it in full.
During peak usage, the app had nearly 100 unique users and has summarized over 1100 videos. It's lightweight, fast, and surprisingly effective—built to just work, without noise.
Under the hood
The front end was originally built in React, then ported to Next.js to support serverless functions for scalability and faster deployment. On the backend, an Express.js server handles everything from parsing YouTube video IDs, to fetching transcripts, processing content, and generating AI-powered paraphrased summaries. The app communicates cleanly between client and server to keep things snappy and modular.
\\ Service Notice
September 2024
As of September 2024, YouTube implemented stricter policies against automated content scraping, which impacted the live summarization functionality of this app. While the app is still online, it now only supports previously summarized videos. A summary list page is available to browse those entries. A new version of the YouTube Paraphraser, compliant with current platform guidelines, is currently in the works—stay tuned.