The video you watched three months ago and cannot quote
There is an odd asymmetry in how we work. A forty-minute meeting ends up transcribed, summarised and searchable, and a ninety-minute talk on YouTube that changed how you approached a project ends up as a link in a stray note. Importing a YouTube video into your notes should be as ordinary as uploading an audio file, and in AudioMap it is: paste the link and that is it.
The idea behind the product is exactly that: everything has audio. A voice note, a meeting, a lecture, a podcast, a conference video. If it has audio, it is material that can be transcribed, analysed, questioned and quoted.
The six origins of a note
AudioMap distinguishes six origins and marks each with its own icon and colour in the library:
- YouTube: paste the video URL.
- Podcast: paste the Apple Podcasts episode URL or the RSS feed, and the specific episode is resolved.
- Link: any direct URL to an audio or video file.
- Video: a file you upload.
- Audio: a file you upload.
- Recording: what you record inside the app.
Keeping them separate is not cosmetic. The library stops being a list of indistinguishable titles and tells you at a glance whether a note is a meeting of yours or someone else's talk, which is the first question you ask coming back two months later.
How to import a YouTube video into your notes, step by step
1. Paste the link. On the upload screen, instead of dragging a file, you paste the URL. The one you get from the share button works.
2. The audio is fetched and transcribed. No copy of somebody else's video is stored: the work happens on the audio. The transcript comes with timestamps and diarization, which on a panel or an interview is what separates the two speakers.
3. Chapters are generated. A long talk is split into blocks, and that is what turns ninety minutes into something navigable.
4. It is analysed with whichever template fits. For an interview or an episode, the Podcast template returns premise, guest, standout quotes, chapters and questions. For a technical talk, Education or Generic fit better. There are thirteen templates and you can pick by hand.
5. You ask, and it answers with the minute. Chat with citations answers about that video quoting the exact moment the claim comes from. That is the difference between a summary asking for faith and a citation you can go and check in the original video.
6. It gets cross-referenced with your own material. Once imported it is just another note: it enters global chat, the knowledge map and search. Which means somebody else's talk and your own meetings can be queried together.
What you can do afterwards
Mark the minute that matters. Point and segment markers on the audio, and timestamped highlights on the text. All of it lands in the My markers notebook, next to what you flagged in your own recordings.
Export. TXT, SRT or JSON. SRT is useful if you are going to quote the video in a presentation and want synchronised subtitles for the exact stretch.
Fix a term. Sector-specific proper nouns get transcribed wrong the first time. Personal vocabulary loads them up front, and if it still slips, the term can be corrected across the whole transcript in one go.
Generate the deliverable. An imported talk can turn into an email with what you want to forward to your team, a document with the ideas in order, or a slide deck to present it. Those are the product's three deliverables and they come out of the same note, so what you share stops being a YouTube link with a "watch minute 42" next to it.
Extract the fragment. A segment marker bounds a stretch, and that piece of audio can be extracted from one minute to another, which is what you need when the thing worth quoting is thirty seconds and not the whole talk.
Automate it. With the REST API a link can be imported from any program, and with the MCP server you can ask your own assistant to import a video and read it for you. It is explained in the article on [MCP and the API](/blog/conecta-tu-ia-con-audiomap-mcp-api).
What it does not do
- It is not a video downloader. It does not hand you the YouTube file. It imports the audio to transcribe and analyse inside your account.
- It does not access private or restricted videos. If the video is not public, there is nothing to import. Nor content that requires signing in.
- It does not grant you rights over someone else's content. The transcript is for your work. Republishing it is a different matter, and that decision is yours and the video licence's.
- It does not process videos of any length. There is a four-hour limit per file, which covers almost any talk, interview or episode.
- It does not import a whole playlist at once. Videos are imported one at a time.
- It does not always succeed on the first try. YouTube frequently blocks requests coming from a data centre, which is why the import retries through several routes. When the block is total, it says so instead of leaving you an empty note.
Frequently asked questions
What does importing a link cost?
AI credits are the currency: importing a short link costs around fifty, generating the analysis a hundred and asking the chat ten per question. The free plan comes with 200 credits a month, just enough to run the whole circuit once, which is what you need in order to decide.
And a podcast episode?
Same thing. Paste the Apple Podcasts URL or the RSS feed and the episode is resolved. That is the Podcast note origin, and from there it is identical to any other note.
Can an English video be analysed in Spanish?
The transcript respects the language spoken. The analysis is generated in Spanish or English, so an English video can end up analysed in Spanish.
Can I ask several videos at once?
Yes, with global chat, which queries your whole library. That is what lets you cross three talks on the same topic and see where they agree and where they do not.
Is the video kept?
For an imported video the work is done on the audio. Video file retention applies to videos you upload yourself, and depends on the plan.
Where is it processed?
On servers in the European Union, like everything else.
Which plan you need
You can try it on the free plan: 300 minutes per month, 200 credits and three analysis templates are enough to import a video, analyse it and ask it a handful of questions.
To use it properly, Personal (€9/month billed annually) gives 1,200 minutes per month, 1000 credits a month, unlimited chat with citations and all thirteen templates. And if the case is following a topic across many sources, Pro (€19/month billed annually) adds global chat over every note and the REST API, which is what you need to automate the import.