AI Stenograms
A stenogram is a literary, readable transcription of a video — a cleaned-up dialogue record with speaker tags, paragraph breaks, and optional timestamps. Tube Search generates stenograms via an LLM from an existing transcript (archived YouTube captions or AI-generated subtitles).
Stenograms are private to the owner: only the user who generated one can read or download it. No public listing or sitemap exposes them.
What You Get
- Speaker tags —
Speaker A:,Speaker B:, etc., inferred from the transcript context - Paragraph-level structure — coherent blocks of dialogue, not raw caption lines
- Optional timestamps — anchor points throughout the document
- Markdown output — copy into any note-taking app or publish as-is
- Language-aware — stenograms are written in the transcript's language; you can also override the target language at generation time
Who Can Generate Stenograms
| Feature | Anonymous | Registered | Plus | MCP + API (L3+) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Generate a stenogram | — | — | — | Per-tier quota |
| View your own stenogram | — | — | — | Yes |
| View another user's stenogram | — | — | — | — (owner-only) |
Stenograms are L3+ only. See Pricing for the MCP + API tier and daily quotas. Check current usage on your Profile → Plan & Usage tab.
How to Generate (Web)
/stenogram/:userId/:videoId. Download as Markdown or delete the stenogram at any time from your Profile → Stenograms tab.How to Generate (MCP / API)
The generate_stenogram tool is exposed through the MCP server for AI assistants such as Claude, Cursor, and VS Code. The contract matches the web button:
- Tool name:
generate_stenogram - Params:
videoId(11-char YouTube ID),language(optional —auto/en/ru/es/de/pt) - Auth: API key with L3+ scope
- Progress: emitted via MCP
notifications/progressif the client passes a progress token
See the MCP Tools Reference and REST API Docs for the full request/response shapes.
Privacy Model
- Owner-only read — the
/api/stenograms/@:userId/:videoIdendpoint returns 404 for anyone but the owner. - No public surfaces — stenograms don't appear in browse pages, sitemaps, search results, or the
hasSummaryFTS filter. - Permanent delete — deletion removes both the database row and the Markdown file. No soft-delete, no recovery.
Requirements
- A transcript must exist — archived subtitles or AI-generated subtitles both qualify.
- L3+ account — the feature is gated at the tier and endpoint level.
- Sufficient daily quota — the counter resets at midnight UTC. REST and MCP share the same per-key limit.