Summarize YouTube Videos into Structured Content Ideas with AI and Airtable

Extract the main idea and key takeaways from YouTube videos and turn them into Airtable content ideas

📝 Description Automatically turn YouTube videos into clear, structured content ideas stored in Airtable. This workflow pulls new video links from Airtable, extracts transcripts using a RapidAPI service, summarizes them with your favourite LLM, and logs the main idea and key takeaways—keeping your content pipeline fresh with minimal effort.

⚙️ What It Does Scans Airtable for new YouTube video links every 5 minutes.

Extracts the transcript of the video using a third-party API via RapidAPI.

Summarizes the content to generate a main idea and takeaways.

Updates the original Airtable entry with the insights and marks it as completed.

🛠 Prerequisites Before using this template, make sure you have:

✅ A RapidAPI account with access to the youtube-video-summarizer-gpt-ai API.

✅ A valid RapidAPI key.

✅ An OpenAI, Claude or Gemini account connected to n8n.

✅ An Airtable account with a base and table ready.

🧰 Setup Instructions Clone this template into your n8n workspace.

Open the Get YouTube Sources node and configure your Airtable credentials.

In the Get video transcript node:

Enter your X-RapidAPI-Key under headers.

The API endpoint is pre-configured.

Connect your LLM credentials to the Extract detailed summary node.

(Optional) Adjust the summarization prompt in the LangChain node to better suit your tone.

Set your preferred schedule in the Trigger node.

📋 Airtable Setup Create a base (e.g., Content Hub) with a table named Ideas and the following columns:

| Column Name | Type | Required | Notes | |-------------|------------|----------|----------------------------| | Type | Single select | ✅ | Must be set to Youtube Video | | Source | URL | ✅ | The YouTube video URL | | Status | Checkbox | ✅ | Leave empty initially; updated after processing | | MainIdea | Single line text | ✅ | Summary generated by OpenAI | | Key Takeaways | Long text | ✅ | List of takeaways extracted from the transcript

Activate the workflow—and you're done!