Distill
Distill turns captioned YouTube videos into written summaries, with a focus on interviews, podcasts, and educational long-form video.
What Distill is
Distill turns captioned YouTube videos into written summaries, with a focus on interviews, podcasts, and educational long-form video. Summaries are prose arranged in sections, and a player above the text lets users jump to a chapter or moment. The app offers separate summary, chapter, and transcript views, a full transcript, and a short quiz after a summary. It relies on YouTube captions and reports when a video has no subtitles instead of inferring content from its title or description. Public captioned YouTube videos are supported; the service focuses on videos roughly four minutes or longer and excludes Shorts and very short clips. Users can paste a YouTube link or open a link shared from YouTube or Safari. Guest access allows one summary per day for videos up to 30 minutes. An email-verified free account allows three daily summaries for videos up to 60 minutes, plus a saved library, history sync, continued watching, and offline reading for saved summaries. Pro costs $3.99 a month and includes unlimited summaries, videos up to two hours, 40+ languages, chapters, transcripts, an outline, and a 7-day free trial. Distill is available on iOS.
Good
- Summaries include chapter and transcript views
- Short quiz follows a summary
- Free account includes saved history and sync
- Pro supports videos up to two hours
Watch out
- YouTube captions are required
- YouTube Shorts and very short clips are unsupported
- Pro costs $3.99 a month
Who it suits
Distill suits iOS users who want written summaries of captioned YouTube interviews, podcasts, or educational videos. It may also suit viewers who want to move between summaries, chapters, and full transcripts.
Verdict
Distill is focused on turning captioned YouTube videos into structured written summaries with chapter and transcript access. Its free options have daily and video-length limits; Pro raises those limits for $3.99 a month.
Plans and prices
From Distill's own pricing page, checked 4 Oct 2026.
| Plan | Price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Free account | Free | 3 summaries per day after email verification · videos up to 60 minutes · saved library and history sync · continue watching · offline reading for saved summaries |
| Guest | Free | 1 summary per day · YouTube links only · videos up to 30 minutes · captions required · no saved library or sync |
| Pro monthly | $3.99 a month | Unlimited summaries · videos up to 2 hours · 40+ languages · chapters, transcripts and outline · 7-day free trial · per month |
| Pro annual | — | Unlimited summaries · videos up to 2 hours · 40+ languages · chapters, transcripts and outline · 7-day free trial · per year |
The facts
Each one read from Distill's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- AI processing
- The privacy policy says captions and video metadata are sent to Distill servers hosted on Railway and then to Google Gemini for longer videos or Groq for eligible shorter videos.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Caption requirement
- Distill summarizes from YouTube captions and says it will report when a video has no subtitles instead of guessing from its title or description.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Chapters and transcripts
- Users can navigate chapter markers, read the full transcript, and switch between summary, chapters, and transcript tabs.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Consent and model training
- Distill says it requests in-app consent before the first AI summary and does not send captions to AI providers until consent is given; it says it does not use content to train third-party foundation models without consent.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Data collection
- The privacy policy lists account information, usage data, basic device and app diagnostics, and says full payment card numbers are not received by Distill.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Data deletion
- Signed-in users can remove saved items in the app and can request deletion of their account and associated data by emailing support from their registered address.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Product
- Distill turns captioned YouTube videos into written summaries and is built for interviews, podcasts, and educational long-form video.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Quiz
- Distill offers a short quiz after a summary.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Security
- The privacy policy says data is encrypted in transit with HTTPS/TLS and access to production systems is restricted.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Sharing
- Users can paste a YouTube link or open a link shared from YouTube or Safari.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Summary format
- Summaries are flowing prose organized into sections.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Support
- Distill says it typically replies to support email within one business day.checked 4 Oct 2026
- Video player
- The video player appears above the summary so users can jump to a chapter or moment.checked 4 Oct 2026
Where it runs
- Supported videos
- The support page says public YouTube videos with captions are supported, focuses on videos roughly four minutes and longer, and does not support YouTube Shorts or very short clips.checked 4 Oct 2026
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