Review: Video Tap - automatically convert YouTube videos to blog posts
Tags: ai, video, blogging
Published: 2023-04-03 12:20:01

---
title: Review: Video Tap - automatically convert YouTube videos to blog posts
published: true
description: 
tags: ai, video, blogging
canonical_url: https://christianheilmann.com/2023/04/03/review-video-tap-automatically-convert-youtube-videos-to-blog-posts/
# cover_image: https://direct_url_to_image.jpg
# Use a ratio of 100:42 for best results.
# published_at: 2023-04-03 12:08 +0000
---
Yesterday [I wrote a blog post about a question I got at a conference](https://christianheilmann.com/2023/04/02/the-future-of-senior-developers-in-an-ai-driven-world/) and I thought I try one of those fancy "AI" tools that grace my inbox every few hours. [Video Tap](https://videotapit.com/?via=chris) promises to turn videos into blog posts. You give it a YouTube URL, and it writes a post for you, looking up and including relevant links and showing you an editing interface when you are done. 

Sounded too good to be true, and suspicious me thought all they do is scrape the auto generated captions of YouTube and show those as paragraphs. I was positively surprised though, how thorough the tool was. 

This was [the video I pointed it to](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1SaRGK9sqg) :

{% youtube p1SaRGK9sqg %}

Much like ChatGPT or the Bing Chat in Microsoft Edge, it wrote a proper blog post for me, taking the information from the video. It found and included relevant links and whilst the post didn't sound like me, it cut my writing time in half. 

![The generated article from my Video in the editing interface](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/aqsgpnvnghmxd381nhue.png)

The editing interface reminds of Medium or Wordpress, so they are treading the cowpaths here.

## Context-aware screenshot tool

Not relevant to this video, but I also love that it gives you a "include screenshot" option. This one shows the video at the time stamp the generated paragraph talks about and allows you to include a screenshot of that time. 

![You can embed a screenshot from your talk anywhere in your post by scrubbing the video](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/epwwh3pfxvw34ynw36hq.gif)

This is much more useful with content that has more meaning that just me talking. Like a slide or a code demo. Code, by the way also seems to get detected and turned into code blocks automatically.

## Publish or export as Markdown or HTML

Once you are happy with the result, you can either publish the post on Video Tap, or you can export it as HTML or Markdown.

![The sharing interface of VideoTap](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/dy7i9vyw55weqkpopapj.png)

The pricing is $1 per minute of video, which is just fair and there are also bulk pricing options for YouTube channels.

## Things I'd love to see

I can see myself using this a lot in the nearer future, but there are a few things I'd love to have to make it even better:

* The ability to upload local videos / not publicly available hosted videos
* Sharing to LinkedIn / Wordpress / Medium
* A domain that is the name of the product. I keep forgetting "Videotapit" and "Videotap" is a domain squatting site.

You can [Try Video Tap here](https://videotapit.com/?via=chris).