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Paste a YouTube playlist link or a list of individual talk URLs and name the research question you are tracking. Anara reads the transcripts from each talk, identifies the main arguments, notes where speakers agree and where they diverge, and returns a structured synthesis. For researchers following a field through conference presentations rather than waiting for papers.

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1. Describe the task

Conference talks often precede published papers by twelve to twenty-four months. Speakers present findings, advance arguments, and reveal where a field’s unresolved debates are heading well before any of it appears in a journal. Watching a full conference day of recorded talks is how you stay current. It is also five to eight hours of video per event. Anara reads the transcripts of talks you point it to and synthesizes across them. You name the research question you are tracking. Anara processes each talk’s transcript, identifies the main arguments, finds where speakers converge and where they diverge, and returns a structured synthesis that covers the range of positions in the time it takes to read a long abstract. A practical note on transcript availability: most recorded lectures from institutional channels (university courses, named conference series, professional association webinars) have transcripts available. For recently uploaded or smaller-channel talks, transcript availability is not guaranteed and Anara falls back to page-level extraction, which is less complete. If a specific talk produces weak output, confirm transcript availability on YouTube before running it again. Here a computational neuroscience graduate student is tracking the debate on neural oscillation theories across a recent conference series and has a playlist of twelve talks from a symposium. 
I am tracking the debate on neural oscillation theories, specifically the disagreement between phase-coding and rate-coding accounts of temporal binding. I have a playlist of talks from the Neural Oscillations Symposium 2025.

Playlist URL: [paste the YouTube playlist URL here]

For each talk in the playlist, identify:
1. The speaker's main argument or finding
2. Their position on phase-coding versus rate-coding (or their explicit refusal to take a position)
3. Any empirical result they present that speaks to this debate

Then write a 300-word synthesis across all talks: where speakers converge, where they diverge, and what the major unresolved questions are that emerged from the symposium. Name specific speakers when citing their positions.

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2. Give Anara context

Required context
  • A YouTube playlist URL or a list of individual YouTube video URLs.
  • The research question or debate you are tracking across the talks.
Optional context
  • Papers in your library by the speakers. Anara can cross-reference the talk’s claims against their prior published work when both are in scope.
  • A time limit per talk. If you have a long playlist and only want Anara to process the first twenty minutes of each talk, say so.

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3. What Anara creates

A per-talk summary covering each speaker’s main argument and their position on the debate you named, followed by a cross-talk synthesis identifying where the symposium converged, where it diverged, and what the open questions are that the symposium surfaced but did not resolve. The synthesis is what you read instead of watching the playlist, and the per-talk summaries let you know which individual talks are worth watching in full.

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4. Follow-up prompts

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Find the papers the speakers cited

When a speaker mentioned a specific study you want to read. 
In the third talk, the speaker cited a 2024 study on phase-locking during memory consolidation in hippocampal neurons. Search the academic index for that study by those parameters and show me the abstract and DOI.

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Import one talk’s transcript for deeper analysis

When a specific talk deserves more than a summary. 
Import the transcript from the fifth talk in the playlist to my library as a document called "Buzsaki 2025 Oscillations Talk." Once it is imported, I want to ask follow-up questions about the specific evidence he presents for phase-coding.

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Compare this symposium’s positions to last year’s

When you have tracked the same debate across multiple conference years. 
I have the synthesis from the 2024 Neural Oscillations Symposium saved as a note. Compare the positions described in this year's synthesis to last year's. Where has the debate moved, and where are the same disagreements still unresolved?

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5. Tricks, tips, and troubleshooting

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How you word your prompt shapes what you get

Name the specific debate or disagreement you are tracking, not just the topic. “Neural oscillations” tells Anara to describe each talk generally. “The disagreement between phase-coding and rate-coding accounts of temporal binding” tells Anara to classify each speaker’s position within that specific argument. For long playlists (more than ten talks), ask Anara to process them in batches of five and produce a partial synthesis after each batch, then combine them. Processing fifteen talks in one prompt risks compression in the per-talk summaries.

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Check the output against your own understanding

Transcript accuracy varies across channels. University lecture recordings typically have high-accuracy transcripts because they were created for accessibility. Talks recorded in conference rooms with audience questions have noisier transcripts where speaker attribution can drift. If a synthesis assigns a position to a speaker that seems wrong, check the transcript directly for the relevant section before citing the synthesis in your own work. The synthesis is a starting document for a field tracking process, not a citable account of what a researcher argued.

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What to do with the output next

Save the per-talk summaries and the synthesis as a note in your library. Add new conference talks to the note as they are published throughout the year. When you are ready to write a review or a dissertation chapter tracking the debate, the note becomes the primary source for the conference-talk thread of your literature review, alongside the published papers you have collected through standard searches.