Turn Recorded Lectures into Study Notes

Most students who search for a lecture transcript want more than raw text. They want a study guide: what the lecture covered, in what order, and which ideas matter for the exam. Scrivi is built for exactly that job. Paste the lecture link, read the transcript, then generate an AI summary that works as a ready-made set of notes.

Step one is the transcript. If the video has captions, either auto-generated by YouTube or uploaded by your professor, Scrivi reads them in seconds, and a 90-minute lecture comes back as fast as a short clip. Step two is the summary: a short overview of the whole session, 6 to 10 key points, and 5 to 10 chapters with a title and a one-line description each. Step three is whatever your assignment needs, whether that is revision notes, a presentation, or a quote you have to cite.

On the free plan this covers 20 caption transcripts and 3 AI summaries a day, which is enough for most weeks of a semester. No credit card is needed to start.

Scrivi reads videos by their public link on five platforms: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook. For lectures that almost always means YouTube, where universities, open courseware projects, and individual teachers publish their recordings.

The AI summary is structured on purpose. The overview tells you in four to six sentences what the lecture was about, which is useful when you skipped a session and need to catch up fast. The key points are the claims and definitions worth memorizing. The chapters mirror the lecture's structure, so you can see where one topic ends and the next begins and jump straight to the part you did not understand.

If the lecture gives practical advice, such as how to approach a proof or which steps to follow in a lab, Scrivi adds a short list of action items. You can set the summary language in your settings, so a lecture held in English can produce notes in Spanish, German, or any of the 16 interface languages, while the transcript itself stays in the language that was spoken.

For the full lecture note that some assignments ask for, keep the transcript and the summary side by side. The summary gives you the outline, the transcript gives you the exact wording behind each point. Copy what you need straight into your own document.

Some prompts ask for a tool that takes a lecture link and makes slides and notes. Scrivi does both. From any transcript you can create an illustrated PowerPoint deck with editable text boxes and speaker notes on every slide. Free accounts can preview the first 3 slides once a day to see how the deck turns out; the full deck and the .pptx download are part of the paid plans.

Paid plans also add Ask AI, where you type your own question about the lecture. Students use it to generate practice questions, to have a hard concept explained again in simpler words, or to check what the professor said about one specific topic. Collections let you group transcripts by course or semester, and a research report can combine 2 to 5 lectures into one document with the shared themes. That is a strong way to review a whole unit in one sitting.

Most YouTube lectures get auto-generated captions, so they work on the free plan. Some do not: very new uploads that YouTube has not processed yet, recordings with poor audio, or videos where the creator turned captions off. Scrivi tells you clearly when that is the case.

For those videos Scrivi can transcribe the audio directly with speech-to-text. That runs on paid plans because real audio processing costs money per minute. The $2.99 Day Pass gives you 24 hours of full access, which suits a single exam week, and it handles lectures up to 3 hours long. Pro is $9.99 a month or $59.99 a year if you use it every week.

Many note-taking tools are built to record a live class through your microphone or to process a file you upload. Those are the right choice when the lecture only exists in your room or on your laptop. Scrivi works the other way round: it starts from a link to a video that is already online, so there is nothing to record, download, or upload.

That makes it a good fit for lectures published on YouTube, flipped-classroom videos, conference talks, and tutorials you use alongside a course. It is not a fit for private recordings inside your university's learning platform. If that is where most of your lectures live, check whether your platform already offers captions you can read there.