TranscriptAPI plugin for Praxist

A Praxist tool_server plugin that gives research agents YouTube transcripts, search, video metadata, and channel uploads.

Praxist is Sapient Intelligence's autonomous research system. This plugin adds four tools to a peer's toolbox so a research run can pull evidence out of video, not just papers and web pages: conference talks, lectures, lab walkthroughs, earnings calls.

Tool	What it returns
youtube_transcript	The transcript of a video, by URL or 11-character ID
youtube_search	Videos or channels matching a query
youtube_video_info	Title, channel, duration, and other metadata for one video
youtube_channel_videos	A channel's latest uploads

Install

Praxist executes plugins from two roots: the bundled root inside the install, and your task project. Third-party plugins go in the task project. ~/.praxist/plugins/ and the working directory are discovered and then filtered out at run time, so they will not work.

git clone https://github.com/ZeroPointRepo/transcriptapi-praxist-plugin.git \
  <your-task>/.praxist/plugins/tools/transcriptapi

Set your key:

export TRANSCRIPTAPI_KEY=your_key_here

Get one at transcriptapi.com. There is a free tier.

Then reference it from your task descriptor's tool servers as tool_server:transcriptapi.

Behaviour

Every handler returns a JSON-serializable dict with a schema_version and never raises. Errors come back as {"error": "..."} so a peer can recover instead of failing the run. With no TRANSCRIPTAPI_KEY set, every tool returns {"error": "TRANSCRIPTAPI_KEY is not set"} and the rest of your task is unaffected, which is the contract Praxist asks of optional tool credentials.

Transcripts are truncated at 20,000 characters and the response sets truncated: true when that happens, so a long video cannot flood a peer's context window.

Verified against

Praxist >=0.1.0,<1.0, Python >=3.11. Resolution, the bundled-execution assertion, entrypoint instantiation, and the ToolServerSpec build were all run against the Praxist plugin loader at commit 437292c, with the plugin installed as task_project under enforce_bundled_execution=True. All four tools were exercised against the live API.

Licence

MIT. TranscriptAPI itself is a commercial API with a free tier. Praxist is separately licensed under a Fair Source Licence by Sapient Intelligence.