Skipper combines crowd-sourced databases with local Gemini AI analysis to automatically jump past sponsors, intros, and self-promotions. Free, fast, and needs zero API keys.
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Playhead tracking sponsor markers
ContentDesigned to make your YouTube viewing experience seamless, fast, and completely distraction-free.
Queries SponsorBlock's database containing millions of community-submitted timestamps. Works instantly for popular uploads with zero logins.
Fills the gaps when community databases don't cover a video. Prompts YouTube's built-in Gemini model to analyze transcripts, comments, and descriptions.
Once Gemini analyzes a video for you, timestamps are automatically synchronized to a shared database. All Skipper users benefit instantly.
Colors YouTube's native timeline overlay with segments, indicating where Sponsors, Self-Promotions, Intros, and Outros reside in the playback bar.
Lookups use privacy-preserving hash-prefix requests. The video ID you are watching is never fully shared. No private tracking or browsing logs stored.
You decide what to skip. Customize settings to automatically skip or simply outline Intros, Outros, Self-Promotional pitches, or Sponsor segments.
Skipper leverages a high-speed, cascading retrieval strategy to skip sponsors seamlessly.
As soon as the page loads, Skipper checks chrome.storage.local to see if the video has been recently skipping-enabled or processed by your local system.
If not locally cached, Skipper checks the shared Supabase public database to see if another Skipper user has already had this video analyzed. If found, skipping is active immediately.
Skipper queries the SponsorBlock crowd-sourced database, searching for segment records for the video via privacy-preserving SHA-256 prefixes.
If the video is a fresh upload and isn't indexed anywhere yet, Skipper drives YouTube's built-in "Ask about this video" Gemini feature in the background to automatically identify sponsor segments, caching the result locally and pushing it to Supabase.
Have questions about Skipper? Find explanations to the most common queries below.
When a video lacks pre-existing sponsor records, Skipper extracts the video metadata, auto-generated transcripts, descriptions, or chapters. It then communicates with YouTube's native "Ask about this video" AI feature (available for logged-in accounts) to evaluate the transcripts and output precise sponsor start and end timestamps.
No! Skipper is free and operates completely out of the box without requiring any API keys. It utilizes your existing browser context to query SponsorBlock and YouTube's built-in AI panel directly.
Yes. We value privacy. For SponsorBlock queries, Skipper sends only the first 4 characters of the SHA-256 hash of the video ID, meaning the full identity of the video you watch is never shared. The extension stores no user-identifying telemetry or history, only timestamps of identified sponsors.
Skipper is built as a standard Manifest V3 extension, meaning it is compatible with Google Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and any other Chromium-based browser.
Absolutely. Skipper is fully open source and published under the MIT License. You can check out the entire codebase, build it locally, or contribute directly on GitHub.
I am a software engineer focused on developing intuitive tools, browser utilities, and open-source applications. I built Skipper to combine modern Gemini AI models with community-driven databases, providing the ultimate distraction-free YouTube experience.
Install Skipper AI directly from the Chrome Web Store and start enjoying a clean YouTube experience today.