Summary steipete/summarize is a versatile CLI tool for generating concise summaries from diverse digital content, including web pages, videos, podcasts, audio/video files, PDFs, and images. It targets developers and power users needing to quickly extract the gist from various sources, automating extraction, transcription, and summarization to save time and enhance information accessibility.

How It Works The CLI processes URLs and local files. For web content, it uses article extraction with a Firecrawl fallback. YouTube and podcasts leverage transcript retrieval or Whisper-based audio transcription (prioritizing local whisper.cpp). Local/remote media files are transcribed by Whisper and then summarized. It integrates with multiple LLM providers via LiteLLM, supporting streaming output rendered as ANSI Markdown. Detailed metrics on execution time, token usage, and estimated costs are provided.

Quick Start & Requirements Requires Node.js 22+. Installation options include npx (no install), global npm (npm i -g @steipete/summarize), or Homebrew (brew install steipete/tap/summarize for macOS arm64). A basic quick-start command is summarize "https://example.com". A Chrome Side Panel extension is also available, requiring a local daemon setup. Documentation is at https://summarize.sh.

Highlighted Details

• Summarizes web pages, YouTube, podcasts, local/remote audio/video, PDFs, images, and text.
• Flexible transcription pipeline: prefers local whisper.cpp, supports cloud Whisper and FAL.
• Streams output to terminal with ANSI Markdown rendering.
• Offers a Chrome Side Panel integration for seamless browser summarization.
• Integrates with multiple LLM providers via LiteLLM, featuring automatic model selection and fallback.
• Includes a --model free preset for discovering OpenRouter models.

Maintenance & Community Information regarding maintainers, community channels (e.g., Discord, Slack), or project sponsorships is not explicitly detailed in the provided README.

Licensing & Compatibility The specific open-source license for this project is not stated in the README. This omission requires further investigation for commercial use or closed-source integration compatibility.

Limitations & Caveats Homebrew installation is limited to Apple Silicon (arm64). Some LLM providers may not support streaming or specific file media types. Text inputs over 10 MB are rejected. Spotify episode summarization is best-effort and may fail for exclusive content. The absence of a stated license is a significant adoption caveat.