Yt-tracker

Yt-tracker is a Python project that automatically generates an AI summary from a YouTube video and sends the result to Telegram via a bot.

It is designed for people who want to track videos efficiently and get the key points without watching the entire content.

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Features

• 📥 Fetch YouTube video information (URL / video ID)
• 🧾 Extract transcript (subtitles) when available
• 🤖 Generate an AI summary (e.g., OpenAI / LLM-based)
• 💬 Send the summary to Telegram (bot → chat/group)
• 🗂️ Supports caching / storing intermediate results (via data/)

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Workflow

1. Input the @channel name
2. Auto fetch the YouTube video from yesterday (UTC+0) by default.
3. Extract transcript (or process subtitle files)
4. Send the transcript to an AI model to summarize
5. Push the summary to Telegram

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Project Structure

Based on the current repository layout:

Yt-tracker/
├── .github/              # CI / workflows
├── data/                 # Cache / intermediate outputs
├── src/                  # Source code
│   └── vtt/              
├── .gitignore
├── .python-version
├── main.py               # Main entry point
├── pyproject.toml
└── uv.lock

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Quick Start

1) Clone

git clone https://github.com/kevinwudev/Yt-tracker.git
cd Yt-tracker

2) Create a virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Windows (PowerShell):

python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate

3) Install dependencies

If the repo provides a lockfile / pyproject, install with your preferred tool:

pip install -e .

If you use uv:

uv lock
uv sync

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Configuration (Environment Variables)

Create a .env file in the project root:

BOT_TOKEN=YOUR_TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN
CHAT_ID=YOUR_TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID
OPENAI_API_KEY=YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY
YOUTUBE_API_KEY=YOUR_YOUTUBE_API_KEY
WAITING_LIST=["@TED", "@CHANNEL_NAME_1", "@CHANNEL_NAME_2"]

Required

• BOT_TOKEN
  Your Telegram bot token (from @BotFather).

• CHAT_ID
  The target chat ID from your bot.

(Not sure how to get the CHAT_ID and BOT_TOKEN? Have a look here)

• OPENAI_API_KEY
  The API key used for summarization (To register a key here).

• YOUTUBE_API_KEY
  API key from YouTube Data API (To register a key here).

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Usage

Run the main script:

python main.py
python main.py -d YYYY-MM-DD # for fetching the specific date (default yesterday)
python main.py -t # send to telegram

Typical behavior:

• reads a target video list/video URL from the given channel name.
• extracts the transcript or downloads to the .m4a file, then generates the transcript via OpenAI.
• generates a summary using the configured AI provider
• sends the summary to Telegram

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Development Notes

Recommended improvements if you want to make this production-grade:

• Add structured logging
• Add retries for network calls (YouTube / Telegram / AI)
• Cache transcripts to reduce API cost
• Add a prompt template file (so prompts are not hard-coded)
• Add unit tests for subtitle parsing and message formatting

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

• Open an issue for bugs / feature requests
• Submit a pull request for improvements

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📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.
See the LICENSE file for details.