Launching Ask Channel AI, an app to talk to any YouTube channel and much more

TLDR: launching https://askchannel.ai to enable searching through thousands of videos in any YouTube channel for answers, insights, quotes, and more. YouTube channels are a first-class citizen instead of videos, so instead of summarizing videos one-by-one, you can now easily pick or add a channel and ask away. More than just a LLM wrapper, this launch also includes API/MCP connectors, bulk transcript downloads, and more.

Learn more here: https://askchannel.ai/features

I wanted to fix my own pain point of searching through YouTube channels to find when something was said.

Often these were livestreams with a lot of Q&As, and many of these videos did not even have transcripts. Gemini might be able to do this, but its not geared for that purpose, and I thought I could offer more product offerings on top.

I could not find any similar product that wasn't super paywalled or pricey.

With this launch, here are the set of features:

• add/import any channel (usually takes 1-2 minutes tops) or pick from an existing one (this in effect crowdsources channels, so the more people use it, the more coverage)
• ask questions across an entire channel's worth of transcripts, in essence a LLM wrapper, but you get to pick between Gemini or Claude
• autoplay most relevant clips in the answer (though a little buggy with accuracy still)
• AI attempts to highlight which sections (similar to chapters) in a video you should watch
• bulk download an entire channel's worth of transcripts at once
• auto-suggested questions at every step of the way to guide the user for extracting insights
• pinpoint keywords and quotes down to an exact timestamp
• has API and MCP connectors to use with your own tooling (e.g. you can ask a channel from Telegram/Discord bots)
• subscribe to email notifications whenever a channel has uploaded, and get summaries of new videos
• transcribe videos that don't have transcripts, either individual or in bulk
• ask multiple channels at once (requires premium)
• deeper research mode (requires premium)

My goal is to create the richest feature set out there for interacting with YouTube channels, AI or not.

Would greatly appreciate any feedback, questions, or if you simply want to throw out any ideas!