Turn any YouTube video into a mind map
Paste a YouTube URL — a lecture, a tutorial, a conference talk, a documentary — and SpawnGraph extracts the transcript and structures it into a navigable mind map. Faster than rewatching, cleaner than scrubbing the timeline.
How it works
- 1Paste a YouTube URL. Standard youtube.com or youtu.be links both work.
- 2SpawnGraph retrieves the transcript. Human-written captions are preferred but auto-generated captions also work.
- 3NLP structures the transcript. Topics and sub-topics become branches; long lectures collapse into a navigable tree.
What YouTube videos work?
Any public YouTube video with captions can be converted — university lectures, conference talks, technical tutorials, interviews, podcasts published as YouTube videos, documentaries, and most explainer content. Captions can be human-written or YouTube's auto-generated transcripts. Music videos and short-form content with little spoken content do not map well because there is not enough structure to extract. Non-English videos depend heavily on caption quality, which varies by language and creator.
Why mind map a YouTube video?
Watching a 90-minute lecture in 2x speed still takes 45 minutes. Reading its transcript top-to-bottom is faster but loses structure. A mind map lets you see the entire video on one screen — the main argument, the key points, the supporting examples — and drill into only the branches that matter for your purpose. You can review for an exam, share the structure with a study group, or pull the bits relevant to your work into your notes — all without rewatching.
Academic and professional use cases
Students use SpawnGraph to capture lecture videos as revision maps before exams. Researchers convert conference talks into shareable summaries for their group. Engineers turn long technical tutorials into reference maps they can revisit later. Anyone who studies via YouTube — and that is many people — can compress hours of viewing into minutes of visual scanning. SpawnGraph uses client-side NLP — you can verify zero network calls during the structuring step by opening DevTools → Network.
Limitations to know
The transcript is the source of truth — if a video has no captions, SpawnGraph cannot map it. Very long videos may be chunked or summarised more aggressively to keep the map navigable. Auto-generated captions for technical content with jargon or accents can produce noisy results — the map quality tracks the caption quality.
In short: SpawnGraph converts YouTube videos into mind maps via their transcripts. Captions are required. The structuring runs client-side; the transcript fetch is server-assisted but nothing is stored.