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Show HN: Discover content in any YouTube channel with RAG

Ask Channel AI transcribes and indexes entire YouTube channels, enabling users to search and ask questions with precise quotes and timestamps. It offers a free tier, affordable pricing, and an API for integration, targeting researchers, journalists, and content creators who need to extract insights from long-form video.

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Ask Channel AI — Search & ask any YouTube channel

Ask Channel AI

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Turn any YouTube channel into an expert you can ask.

How do you stay consistent when motivation runs out?

Searching transcripts…

The recurring advice is to shrink the habit until it survives your worst days, then anchor it to a routine you already keep. Motivation is treated as a bonus — the system is what carries you.

Why Discipline Beats Motivation Every Time

He breaks down why leaning on motivation fails, and the simple system he uses to show up anyway.

14:32

2:14

“Motivation gets you started, but the system is what keeps you going when you don’t feel like it.”

6:05

“Shrink the habit until it’s so small it survives even your worst, busiest days.”

11:48

“Anchor the new thing to something you already do without thinking — that’s what makes it stick.”

Finding the most relevant quotes…

⚡️ Pick or add a channel, ask a question, and get answers instantly. 🎯 Find exact quotes and timestamps buried within thousands of hours of videos. 🆓 Free to use, no Chrome extensions, no paywall.

Learn more about the features

1

Pick an existing channel or add a new channel

2

Ask a question

417

Channels

325,519

Videos Imported

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Ask Channel AI transcribes and indexes every video in a YouTube channel, then lets you search the transcripts and ask questions. Every answer comes back with exact quotes and timestamps that link to the moment in the source video.

Anyone who needs answers out of long-form video instead of watching hours of it. Researchers and students mine lectures, talks, and interviews for evidence; journalists and fact-checkers find exactly what someone said on the record; content creators and podcasters search and repurpose their own back catalog; analysts and investors pull insights from commentary, earnings, and news channels; educators build study material; and curious fans dig through a favorite show's archive. If a YouTube channel holds knowledge you want to search, cite, or ask questions about, it's for you.

General assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini haven't watched the specific channel you care about — they answer from training data, usually can't see newer or niche videos, and can't point you to the exact moment something was said. Ask Channel AI indexes that channel's actual transcripts, so every answer is grounded in what the creator really said and cites the exact quote, video, and timestamp you can verify — no made-up paraphrases.

For one video, sure. But a channel can have thousands of videos — far more than you can paste into a single chat. Ask Channel AI indexes the whole channel once and then pulls only the passages relevant to each question, so answers stay grounded in the videos and arrive with citations, instead of a model summarizing one transcript or guessing from memory.

It has some — but it's a general-purpose assistant and won't reliably surface exact quotes or timestamps, usually only chapters. Ask Channel AI is built specifically for this: precise citations, search across a channel's whole back catalog, and the option to plug into your own apps and workflows through an API.

That works inside the single video you're watching. Ask Channel AI works across a channel's entire back catalog at once, cites the exact video and timestamp behind every answer, and can even answer across several channels — or through an API.

Most "YouTube transcript" tools just hand you the transcript — a file to read. Ask Channel AI does the whole job for you: it transcribes a channel, indexes it, finds the parts relevant to your question, and writes an answer with citations — across entire channels and through an API. We don't know of another product that does this for any YouTube channel.

Open any channel on Ask Channel AI and type a question or keyword. It searches across every transcribed video in the channel — by exact keyword and by meaning — and returns the matching moments with citations you can click through to.

Yes. Add a channel and Ask Channel AI fetches and transcribes its videos, building a searchable index of the entire back catalog you can ask questions about — no manual transcribing required.

Yes. You can ask one question across several channels at the same time to compare what different creators say about a topic, with sources from each.

Videos without YouTube captions can still be transcribed from their audio, so coverage often goes beyond what YouTube shows. Videos with no usable audio are simply skipped — they're never counted as failures.

Yes. Whatever language the video is in, answers come back in the language you ask your question in — while the quotes stay in the creator's original words.

Every answer is built from the channel's real transcripts, and each claim shows the exact quote, video, and timestamp it came from — click to check it in the source. The system answers from the transcripts, not from a model's general memory, so there's always something to verify against.

Very competitively. Importing a channel costs 1 credit for every 10 videos, and a credit is just $0.01 — so a 1,000-video channel costs about $1. If a video has no existing transcript, transcribing its audio adds $0.10 per hour of video. And signing up gives you 1,000 free starter credits, so your first imports are on us.

Yes. Ask Channel AI offers a public channel-QA REST API, an official SDK, and MCP access, so you can build YouTube transcript search and question-answering into your own apps and bots.

Still have questions? Reach out on Discord, X, or email [email protected].

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