Distill vs yTeaser

Distill turns captioned YouTube videos into written summaries, with interviews, podcasts, and educational long-form video as its focus. Summaries are flowing prose divided into sections, and users can switch among summary, chapter, and transcript views. A player above the summary lets viewers jump to a chapter or moment, and each summary is followed by a short quiz. Distill relies on captions and reports when a video has no subtitles rather than inferring content from its title or description. It supports public captioned YouTube videos, focuses on videos roughly four minutes and longer, and does not support Shorts or very short clips. Users can paste a YouTube link or open one shared from YouTube or Safari. Guest access allows one summary a day for videos up to 30 minutes. An email-verified free account allows three daily summaries for videos up to 60 minutes, plus a saved library, sync, continued watching, and offline reading. Pro is $3.99 a month and includes unlimited summaries, videos up to two hours, 40+ languages, chapters, transcripts, and an outline. Distill is available on iOS.

yTeaser takes a YouTube link and returns an AI summary with three extracted takeaways, each under 100 characters. It detects the video’s language, summarizes in that language, and translates non-English videos into English. Optional sentiment analysis grades reactions in top comments from A+ to F. The web app and Chrome extension provide access; the extension adds a summary button to YouTube thumbnails and shows results inline. A REST API offers video summarization and English translation endpoints, rate limited to 20 and 30 requests per minute respectively. The Slack bot detects YouTube links and replies in message threads, although the site says it is awaiting Slack review and approval. The free plan costs nothing and allows 10 summaries per day without an account. Pro costs $1.99 a month or $9.90 a year, with 50 summaries per day and priority support. yTeaser accepts YouTube links, not uploads. Summaries may fail for private, age-restricted, removed, or very short videos.