[Productivity] Creating Lecture Notes using YouTube Auto-generated Subtitles
There are a lot of excellent lectures on YouTube, which surged after the COVID-19 pandemic. But we (graduate students) are always short on time and want to take notes on what we learned. Here are some simple tips for creating notes from lectures on YouTube.
Step 1. download auto-generated subtitles.
Download subtitles from Youtube – DownSub
Some videos have subtitles put by the uploader, indicated as “English (United States).” In general, the video only has the auto-generated one. Please download the “TXT” file format.
Unfortunately, auto-generated subtitles do not have punctuation, so it is difficult to use them as lecture notes.
Step 2. Add punctuation using AI
Good news – there is a website that automatically punctuates the text. Please see the bottom example 🙂 You can see it is much easier to read than the raw text.
Step 3. Capture the slides from the video
▶️Slid – YouTube Screenshot Notes (Chrome Web Store)
The next step is to capture a PowerPoint slide (if not provided). A chrome extension called Slid helps you to easily capture slides from YouTube videos and export them to Notion.
Slid also allows you to repeatedly capture specific parts of the YouTube screen. If you export it in Markdown or Word format, you can organize the punctuated transcript we made before!
Step 4. Organize in Notion or Word
My preferred method of organizing lecture notes is to export them to Markdown and import them into Notion. You can see how to do it with more details in another post of mine.