summarize

Summarize does one thing: point it at a URL, YouTube video, podcast, PDF, or media file and get the gist back. It ships as a CLI and a browser side panel (Chrome and Firefox), pulls transcripts, does OCR on video slides, and streams the summary back as markdown. MIT licensed and free.

Setup depends on how deep you go. The browser extension installs from the web store and can run fully on-device using Chrome's built-in Gemini Nano, no keys, no cost. The CLI needs Node 24 and an LLM provider configured, plus optional native tools (ffmpeg, yt-dlp, tesseract) if you want the video and audio features. None of it is hard, but the CLI has more moving parts than the extension.

For anyone who reads and watches more than they have time for, this is a genuine time-saver and mostly free. Solo users and small teams get the same value; there is no seat model. The provider choice is where money enters: free models via OpenRouter or on-device Gemini Nano cost nothing, while OpenAI or Anthropic bill per token.

The catch is that a summary is only as good as the model behind it, and the free on-device model is not the sharpest. For quick triage of an article, Gemini Nano is fine. For summarizing something you actually need to get right, you will want a stronger paid model, and then you are paying per summary.