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YouTube Transcript Distiller Update V1.5.6

Version 1.5.6 of the YouTube Transcript Distiller is live on addons.mozilla.org. It fixes a one-day outage that Google caused on July 21. It also bundles version 1.5.5 from July 12, which cleans up the typography of the summaries. If the add-on is new to you, the introduction post covers the basics.

The Transcript Distiller button in the YouTube action bar, next to the subscribe button

What’s new

  • On July 21, every summary attempt failed. The error read: “Gemini API Fehler: Request contains an invalid argument.” Video and settings made no difference, because Google had moved its model aliases to a new Gemini generation overnight. Version 1.5.6 repairs the request, so there is nothing to change on your side. Firefox updates the add-on on its own.
  • Error messages now name the culprit. Some failures you can’t fix in the settings: an API rejection like the one above, or a Google server error. Until now, the message left you guessing. Now it says so and also points to the add-on page, where the update shows up. An invalid API key still gets its own message and reopens the key input.
  • Since 1.5.5, summaries only contain characters you could type yourself. No em dashes, no curly quotes, no single-character ellipsis. A comment should look hand-typed, but these characters betray the machine.
  • One more tip: if you dislike a summary, run the Distiller again on the same video. The add-on generates with temperature 0.4, so every run words the text a little differently. Each run costs one request of the daily free quota, though.

How it’s done

  • The default model is the alias ID gemini-flash-lite-latest. Version 1.5.1 picked it so the add-on survives model retirements. On July 21 the alias started resolving to gemini-3.5-flash-lite. The 3.5/3.6 generation rejects thinkingBudget: 0, the parameter the add-on sent to switch off model reasoning. Older generations accepted or ignored it. The new ones instead answer HTTP 400 and name neither field nor reason.
  • Diagnosis took two minimal requests: one with the parameter, one without. 400 versus 200. Then the modelVersion field of the successful response named the model behind the alias. That’s how the generation change surfaced.
  • The fix drops thinkingConfig entirely. Lite models don’t reason without it anyway; their responses carry no thoughtsTokenCount. The other models now follow their own defaults. Alias IDs trade one failure mode for another: the model never disappears, but a new generation can reject a parameter overnight. That trade is also why the new error hint exists.
  • The blame check is narrower than it looks, because Google reports an invalid API key as HTTP 400 too. So the add-on inspects the error details (API_KEY_INVALID) before it declares a failure unfixable.
  • The typography cleanup in 1.5.5 works on two layers. First, a character rule in the default prompt of all eleven languages. Second, a sanitizer for every Gemini response, because models mirror the style of their prompt and custom prompts don’t contain the rule.

What’s next

  • Unchanged from last time: prompt profiles, a preview before posting, and a length check against YouTube’s 10,000-character comment limit.

Changelog and source: github.com/michaelruck/yt-transcript-distiller. Install: addons.mozilla.org/addon/youtube-transcript-distiller.

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