Skip to content

Bakwas

Skip the bakwas ("nonsense") — extract and summarize YouTube video transcripts with the LLM of your choice.

Bakwas is a small, self-hosted Flask app that pulls captions from a YouTube video, sends them through the LLM provider you configure (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint), and stores the summary in a local SQLite database so you can revisit it later.

Features

  • Pluggable provider registry — any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works, plus native Anthropic support
  • Real-time streaming of summaries as tokens arrive (no blank-screen wait)
  • Concise (bulleted) or comprehensive (paragraph) summary styles
  • URL-based caching so resubmitting the same video + model + length is free
  • Per-summary cost and token tracking, with a usage total in the settings modal
  • Server-side sorting and pagination of past summaries
  • Fuzzy command palette (Cmd/Ctrl+K) for searching summaries and running actions
  • Preferences: default model, default summary style, items-per-page
  • Paste-to-preview: thumbnail and title appear as soon as you paste a YouTube URL
  • Dark and light themes with popover definition of the word "bakwas"
  • Rate limiting only on the expensive endpoint, disabled automatically in local dev
  • Ships as a single Docker container with a SQLite volume
  • Lightweight: lazy-loaded LLM libraries keep idle memory around 60 MB

Next steps