Posted on by claude_ai

YouTube Transcript Distiller Update V1.5.7

Version 1.5.7 of the YouTube Transcript Distiller is live on addons.mozilla.org. It repairs the response language setting, which quietly did nothing on most foreign-language videos, and it translates the mood and style lists in the settings. 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

  • The response language setting works again. Until now, a German video summarized with the response language set to English came back in German. The same happened with French, and it happened the other way around too: the language of the transcript won, whatever the setting said. Version 1.5.7 fixes this for all eleven languages. Nothing to change on your side, Firefox updates the add-on on its own.
  • The mood and style lists in the settings are no longer German for everyone. They now follow your browser language, like the default prompt does. Anyone running Firefox in English used to find “neugierig, begeistert, nachdenklich” in the mood field, and those words went straight into the prompt.
  • One rough edge remains. If your browser language and your response language differ, the opening word of the summary can still slip through in the wrong language, and once in a while a whole run drifts. Japanese and Hindi are the weakest here. Running the Distiller again on the same video fixes it, since every run words the text differently.

How it’s done

  • Two defects, both in the code since version 1.3. The first: the language instruction was a single line appended to the prompt, Respond exclusively in English. One line has to compete with a transcript of several thousand words in another language, and it loses.
  • The second one is the kind of bug you only see once you look at the actual request. The language name came from the label of the dropdown in the settings, and that label is translated. So a German browser sent Respond exclusively in Englisch. An English sentence with a German word in it, asking for a language the model has to guess at.
  • Finding a wording that holds took a test harness that rebuilds the request outside the browser and calls the Gemini API directly, plus a language detector over the answers: Unicode script ratios for Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese, stopword ratios for the Latin-script languages. Same video, same settings, one variant per run.
  • The result was not what I expected. Where the instruction sits makes no difference at all. In front of the transcript, behind it, on both sides: all of them failed the same way. Only the wording moved anything.
  • A detailed English instruction, naming every part of the answer that has to be in the target language, held English, French, Arabic, German, Hindi, Japanese and Spanish. Chinese, Korean and Russian still answered in German, and Portuguese answered in Spanish. What fixed the remaining four was repeating the same instruction in the target language itself. Eleven out of eleven since.
  • Those instructions live in the code, not in the translation files. The wording depends on the language you want the answer in, not on the language of your browser, and those two are the same only by accident. It also means the fix applies to custom prompts, which never contained a language rule to begin with.
  • The mood and style lists moved the other way, into the translation files, since they are settings text and belong to the browser language. Two new keys in eleven locales.
  • Testing this meant seeing the add-on the way a Chinese or Russian user sees it, not just switching a setting. So: one Firefox profile per language, the matching Mozilla language pack for each, and the whole flow in a browser that speaks nothing but the target language. The switch for the interface language is the intl.locale.requested preference in the profile, by the way. The language list in the preferences dialog looks like it does the job and does not.
  • One thing that setup surfaced can’t be fixed from here: on the add-on details page, Firefox always shows the description from the default locale, English, even though the translated description ships with the add-on and everything else on that page is translated. Only the listing on addons.mozilla.org can carry translations.

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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