Studying from YouTube Videos

A huge amount of useful material lives on YouTube, recorded conference talks, product walkthroughs, certification prep, recorded lectures. Paste a link and Scholarly reads the video's transcript, saves it as a source in your library, and lets you build from it like any other upload.

Where to Paste a Link

• Add content dialogue: Open Add content (from Home or the New menu), stay on the Upload tab, and paste the link into the Or paste a link field. It accepts YouTube videos, websites, and PDF links, click Add URL to queue it.
• Any AI create modal: The upload tab in every create flow (flashcards, quizzes, podcasts, video lectures, and the rest) has the same link field, so you can go straight from a YouTube URL to a finished deck in one dialogue.

You can mix a YouTube link with other sources in the same batch, pair the lecture video with the professor's slides PDF and generate from both together.

What You Can Build

Once the video is added, choose what to make:

• Flashcards and practice quizzes
• AI Video Lectures, a fresh narrated lecture built from the video's content
• AI Podcasts
• Study guides, summaries, worksheets, and outlines
• AI Slides, mind maps, infographics, timelines, and more

Watching the Video in Scholarly

The video also gets its own page in your library, built for studying rather than just watching:

• Chapters: Jump between sections of the video.
• Transcript: Read along, and click any line to seek to that moment.
• Summary: An AI summary of the whole video.
• Flashcards: Create a deck from the video without leaving the page; a linked deck stays attached to the video.
• AI Chat: The chat panel on the video page already knows the video, so you can ask "what did they say about X?" and get grounded answers.
• Interactive questions: Quick check-in questions appear while you watch, with a toggle to turn them off. See Interactive Video Questions.

How Transcripts Are Used

Scholarly works from the video's transcript, so everything it generates is grounded in what's actually said, not a guess based on the title. Long videos are fine: multi-hour recordings work too.

When a Transcript Isn't Available Yet

A link that doesn't come back with a transcript gets a specific message, not one generic dead end:

• Still being transcribed: the video is added to your library right away and the transcript finishes on the video's own page. Ask again shortly.
• Deleted, private, or blocked in your region: the video can't be read. Use a different link.
• Still live streaming: wait until the stream has ended, then add the link again.
• No captions at all: upload the audio or video file directly instead.
• A temporary problem on the transcript service: try again in a moment.

Chat says the same thing: ask about a linked video whose transcript is still running and it tells you it is still processing and suggests asking again, rather than failing the lookup.

Tips

• Talks and explainers work best. Talk-heavy videos give the AI the most to work with; music videos or footage with little speech won't produce useful material.
• One topic per generation. For a long playlist, add videos individually and generate per video (or group them in a folder) rather than mashing unrelated topics into one deck.
• Combine formats. A recorded talk plus the matching slide deck or handbook chapter as sources gives noticeably better flashcards than either alone.

Plan Notes

• Adding a YouTube link counts towards your plan's upload allowance, the same as uploading a file.
• Generating study material from a video uses an AI Creation Credit, like any other source. See Plans and Limits.

Related

• Uploading Content, all the ways to bring material into Scholarly.
• Transcription, turning a video into a downloadable .txt or .vtt transcript file.
• Paste Text, for when you have the transcript as text instead of a link.
• AI Chat, asking questions about anything in your library.