如何透過 Apify MCP 為 AI 智能體接入影片逐字稿、聯絡資料及新聞工具

Agents are good at deciding what data they need and bad at fetching it. Instead of writing glue code, you can give an MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code and others) a few Apify Actors as tools and let it call them directly. Here is a minimal setup using three small Actors, with the real prices and the limits.

The config

Apify hosts an MCP server at mcp.apify.com. The tools parameter limits it to the Actors you name, and your Apify API token goes in an Authorization header:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "siftwright-data": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=siftwright/youtube-transcript-extractor,siftwright/contact-details-extractor,siftwright/google-news-scraper",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Apify adds run and dataset helper tools (such as fetching dataset items) automatically, so the agent can read results. Check Apify's MCP docs for the current format; it has changed before.

The three tools

Actor	What it returns	Price
YouTube Transcript Extractor	Transcript of a video as text, SRT or VTT	$0.003 per transcript
Contact Details Extractor	Emails, phones and social links from a website	$0.002 per website
Google News Scraper	News articles for a search topic	$0.0015 per article

These are pay-per-event Actors: you are charged for results that were produced, and failed lookups are not charged. Apify also charges a tiny per-run start fee ($0.00005).

Three prompts to try

"Get the transcript of this video and give me five bullet points: "
"Find a contact email and LinkedIn page for example.com, acme.io and foo.dev."
"What are the 10 latest news stories about ? Group them by theme."

The agent picks the Actor, fills the input, runs it and reads the dataset. A single call costs a fraction of a cent.

Honest limits

Running Actors needs an Apify account and token. Without one, the server only offers search and docs tools.
YouTube blocks some server IPs, so a small share of videos can fail. Those are not charged.
Contact extraction only finds what is published on the site's own pages. It does not guess addresses.
Agents can loop. Set a spending limit on your Apify account and keep the tools list short.
Siftwright also runs its own hosted MCP server for its API plans, which needs a paid key. The Apify route above does not.

Try it without an agent first

The free browser tools at siftwright.com/tools run the same lookups with no signup, so you can see the output shape before wiring anything up.