igerman00 / buttercup-chrome

A Chrome(ium) extension to replace YouTube's auto-captions with Whisper-generated ones

Buttercup - Better YouTube Captions

A Chrome(ium) extension to enhance your YouTube caption experience. Say goodbye to those horrible auto-generated captions. Powered by whisper-jax, thanks to the API provided by Sanchit Gandhi.

Features

• Whisper-Generated Captions: Leverages Whisper AI tech for decent captions.
• Automatic Replacement: Replaces YouTube's default auto-captions with Buttercup, not affecting videos with existing real captions. Real captions always take priority over automatically generated ones.
• Caching System: Utilizes an optional caching database to store video IDs and generated captions for enhanced performance and to avoid hammering the Whisper API.
• Translation: Seamlessly translate all speech to English. An option and a separated database for English-translated captions are available.

Installation

1. Enable Developer Mode in Chrome Extensions.
2. Download this repository and unpack the ZIP file to a safe location.
3. Load the unpacked extension in Chrome(ium) through the Extensions (chrome://extensions) menu.

Privacy and Data Usage

Buttercup has no need to spy on you, however:

• You can opt out of using the cache database in the extension settings.
• IP addresses are stored briefly for rate limiting and are not linked to captions or video IDs.
• The database source code is not yet available.

Getting Started

After installation, simply navigate to any YouTube video and play it. Upon clicking the captions button, the icon of which will be replaced with BC, Buttercup will automatically replace YouTube's captions with the enhanced ones, unless real captions are available. No additional steps or configurations are needed.

Translation

When you enable translation after clicking the extension's icon, all requests will only interact with the English part of the database, so you will have a different set of cached captions, and your generated captions will be stored in the database with a flag. The Whisper api will translate all speech to English as best it can. Only English can be supported, no other translation languages will be supported.

Support & Feedback

Encountered an issue? Have suggestions? Feel free to open an issue or a pull request on this GitHub repository. I'm always looking to improve Buttercup and appreciate your feedback.

Credits

• Sanchit Gandhi for the public API for whisper-jax
• DualSubs project and Virgil Clyne specifically for some help on overriding the responses for YouTube's captions API
• Cloudflare for providing the free and easy-to-use serverless architecture and KV database API for the cache database service