Index YouTube | Captain Docs

Index YouTube video transcripts into a collection.

Fetches transcripts from YouTube videos using auto-generated or manual captions, formats them with inline timestamps, and indexes the text for semantic search.

Accepts either a single url string or a urls array of strings. Transcripts are always processed as basic text (no OCR needed).

Headers:

Authorization: Bearer {api_key} - Captain API key for authentication
X-Organization-ID: Organization UUID
Idempotency-Key: UUID for request deduplication (optional)

Args: collection_name: Name of the collection (path parameter) body: YouTube configuration with url or urls and optional language preferences

Returns: { job_id, status: “pending” }

Index YouTube video transcripts into a collection. Fetches transcripts from YouTube videos using auto-generated or manual captions, formats them with inline timestamps, and indexes the text for semantic search. Accepts either a single `url` string or a `urls` array of strings. Transcripts are always processed as basic text (no OCR needed). Headers: - Authorization: Bearer {api_key} - Captain API key for authentication - X-Organization-ID: Organization UUID - Idempotency-Key: UUID for request deduplication (optional) Args: collection_name: Name of the collection (path parameter) body: YouTube configuration with url or urls and optional language preferences Returns: { job_id, status: "pending" }

Path parameters

collection_namestringRequired

Request

This endpoint expects an object.

custom_metadatamap from strings to strings or integers or doubles or booleans or lists of strings or nullOptional

Custom metadata to attach to all indexed chunks. Keys must be strings. Values: str, int, float, bool, or List[str].

languageslist of strings or nullOptional

Preferred transcript languages in priority order (ISO 639-1 codes). Defaults to English. Only specify if you need a non-English transcript (e.g., [‘fr’, ‘de’]). Falls back to auto-generated captions if manual transcript unavailable.

urlstring or nullOptional

A single YouTube video URL (youtube.com/watch?v=, youtu.be/, youtube.com/shorts/). Provide either ‘url’ or ‘urls’, not both.

urlslist of strings or nullOptional

A list of YouTube video URLs to index. Provide either 'url' or 'urls', not both.

mask_piibooleanOptionalDefaults to false

When true, detected PII (emails, phone numbers, SSNs, credit cards, names, and locations) is masked in the parsed content before it is embedded and stored — replaced with entity tags like <PERSON> and <EMAIL_ADDRESS>. For images (including images embedded in PDFs), PII text visible in the image is also pixel-redacted. Opt-in; defaults to false, which leaves content unchanged.

Response

Successful Response

job_idstring

statusstringOptionalDefaults to pending