YouTube's Watch Later is capped at 5,000 videos, has no search inside the list, no transcripts on the saved card, and was hidden behind the three-dot menu in the March 2026 redesign. MarkIt saves the title, channel, thumbnail, transcript, and an AI summary - and lets you search across the actual content of every video, not just titles.
Forward any YouTube link to MarkIt's WhatsApp or Telegram bot, or paste it into the dashboard. The bot saves the title, channel, thumbnail, and AI summary, pulls the full caption track as a searchable transcript when one exists, and files the save under the right category in about 5 seconds. Search later with natural language - 'that lecture about distributed systems with the chart' returns the right video. Free up to 40 saves per month.
YouTube is one of the largest learning libraries on the open web. People save videos to come back to later constantly - long-form tutorials, conference talks, cooking demos, course lectures, music covers, recipes from creators, gym routines. The intent is real and high-value.
YouTube's answer is Watch Later, a system playlist every account gets. It works as a flag but breaks the moment your library scales. Watch Later is capped at 5,000 videos (the same cap YouTube applies to every playlist), cannot be renamed, cannot have sub-folders or tags, has no full-text search across captions or descriptions, and was buried behind the three-dot menu in YouTube's March 2026 desktop redesign.
The result: a long scroll of thumbnails sorted only by date-added or popularity, none of which helps you find 'the pasta recipe with the lemon-and-parmesan sauce' three weeks later.
Watch Later was designed for one or two videos you wanted to finish tonight. It does not survive contact with serious video-as-reference usage.
Tap Share on the YouTube video, send the link to MarkIt's WhatsApp or Telegram bot. Or paste the URL into the web dashboard, or share from the YouTube mobile share sheet. Works for full videos, Shorts, and live-stream archives.
Within about 5 seconds the bot pulls the title, channel, thumbnail, description, and duration. When the video has captions (auto-generated or creator-uploaded), MarkIt indexes the full transcript as searchable text and generates an AI summary. The save is auto-categorized into one of your 12 categories.
Find a saved video by what was said in it - 'the lecture about Postgres connection pooling that talked about pgBouncer' - even if the title and description say neither. Inside WhatsApp itself, ask the bot 'find that recipe video Sara sent me with the lemon olive oil cake.' Playback still happens on YouTube.
YouTube videos are dense - the actual content lives in the spoken transcript, not the title and thumbnail. A useful save indexes all of it:
The creator-set title, fully searchable.
So you can filter your library by creator and refind everything you saved from one channel.
Proxied so the preview survives in your library even if YouTube changes its CDN.
The full video description, often used by creators to add timestamps, links, and recipe ingredients - all searchable.
Filter by length when you want a 5-minute tip vs a 3-hour lecture.
When the video has captions (auto-generated or creator-uploaded), MarkIt indexes the full caption text as searchable transcript. Works for any language YouTube has captions for.
Built from the transcript so old saves are not opaque six months later.
Your saves are yours. MarkIt does not train AI on your library, does not sell data, and does not share what you save with other users. Transcripts and summaries run server-side via OpenAI under their 30-day-retention API terms. Export your full library as JSON anytime by emailing [email protected].
No. MarkIt saves the YouTube URL, title, channel, thumbnail, description, transcript, and an AI summary. Playback still happens on YouTube when you click the link. The transcript is what makes the save searchable.
Yes, as long as YouTube has captions for the video (auto-generated or creator-uploaded). MarkIt indexes the transcript in the captioned language, and you can search across it in English or Hebrew thanks to bilingual semantic search.
Unlisted videos work as long as you have the URL and captions exist. Truly private videos require login to the uploader's Google account, so they cannot be processed without OAuth that MarkIt does not request.
Yes. Shorts use standard YouTube URLs, so title, channel, thumbnail, and any caption track are saved exactly the same way as long-form videos.
You can save a live stream URL during or after the stream. Transcripts only become available once the broadcast ends and YouTube has generated captions, so save-during-live will pull the transcript on a later re-process pass.
The save still succeeds with title, channel, thumbnail, description, and duration. There just will not be a transcript to search. The AI summary in that case is built from the description text.
Free tier is capped at 40 captures per month across every source. Pro tier (in early access) has higher monthly limits. There is no per-platform sub-limit.
MarkIt is one library across every source you save from. The bot understands YouTube and these:
Free up to 40 captures a month. Includes the WhatsApp bot, Telegram bot, full caption-based transcripts, AI summaries, AI categorization, and semantic search across the transcript itself. No credit card.
Start freeSee how MarkIt works in 3 steps, or compare Free and Pro.