Summarize: the browser extension that phones home—to your own machine

What it does summarize is a dual-interface summarizer: a Chrome Side Panel / Firefox Sidebar extension and a TypeScript CLI that ingests web pages, PDFs, images, audio, video, YouTube links, podcasts, and RSS feeds, then returns structured Markdown summaries via a pluggable LLM backend. The browser version offloads heavy lifting—transcription, OCR, slide extraction, and video processing—to a local daemon running on 127.0.0.1, while the CLI works standalone. Both support streaming output, configurable length targets, and a long list of providers from OpenAI and Anthropic to local OpenAI-compatible endpoints.

The interesting bit The project treats the browser as a thin client and your laptop as the compute layer, using yt-dlp, ffmpeg, and tesseract locally to extract video slides and transcripts rather than shipping media to the cloud. It also auto-detects when raw content is already shorter than your requested summary length and skips the LLM entirely unless you force it.

Key highlights

• Media-aware pipeline: published transcripts first, then falls back to cloud or local transcription (Groq, whisper.cpp, AssemblyAI, Gemini, etc.)
• Video slide extraction for YouTube and local files, pairing OCR’d screenshots with timestamped transcript cards
• Supports a wide provider zoo: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, OpenRouter, plus coding-specific agents like Codex, Cursor Agent, and OpenCode
• Smart length presets from short (~900 chars) to xxl (~17,000 chars), with a bypass when content is already brief
• Accepts stdin, local files, and remote URLs; rejects text inputs over 10 MB before tokenization

Caveats

• The browser extension is essentially a remote control for a localhost service; if the daemon isn’t running, the Side Panel is just a pretty face
• Some model/provider combinations refuse certain file types or streaming, and the README notes xAI models specifically cannot handle generic file attachments like PDFs
• Spotify podcast episodes are “best-effort” and may fail for exclusives

Verdict Ideal for developers who live in the terminal and want one tool to digest documentation, conference talks, and long PDFs. Skip it if you need a fully self-contained browser extension with no local dependencies.