AI video summary

Goal: get an automatic AI-generated summary of a video's content, derived from its subtitle transcript, so clients can quickly understand what a video covers without watching it end to end.

Prerequisites

  • The video must have a subtitle file (.srt) uploaded or auto-generated via AI transcription. The summary is generated from the transcript text — no transcript means no summary.

How it works

When a video has subtitles (either uploaded manually or generated via AI transcription), a background queue job sends the transcript text to an AI model. The model reads the full transcript and produces a concise natural-language summary of the video's content. This runs automatically — you don't need to trigger it.

The summary job is queued automatically when subtitles are uploaded or paired with a video. It also runs after AI transcription completes.

Viewing the summary

Admin side

  1. Open the video from Videos → [Collection] → [video].
  2. Click the Video Summary button below the player.
  3. A modal shows the summary text (or a status message if it's still generating).

Client side

Clients see the summary displayed below the video player on their video view. No action is needed on their part — it appears automatically when a summary is available.

Summary statuses

StatusMeaning
pendingThe summary is being generated. Check back shortly.
doneA summary is available and displayed.
skippedNo transcript was available, or the model returned no summary. The video may need subtitles uploaded first.
failedThe AI service returned an error after all retry attempts. You can try regenerating.

Regenerating a summary

From the admin video detail page, open the Video Summary modal and click Regenerate. This re-sends the transcript to the AI model and replaces the existing summary. This is useful if the original summary was poor quality or if you've updated the subtitles.

Changing the summary

The summary is fully AI-generated and cannot be manually edited. If you want a different summary, click Regenerate to get a fresh one from the AI model. The new summary replaces the previous one.

Videos without transcripts

If a video has no subtitle file (uploaded or auto-generated), the summary job is skipped with a "skipped" status. Upload or generate subtitles first, then regenerate the summary.

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