YouTube Transcript Generator

How to get the transcript of a YouTube video

1. Copy the link. On the YouTube website, copy the address bar or use Share → Copy link. In the app, tap Share under the video and choose Copy link. youtu.be links and Shorts work too.
2. Paste it above and press Go. The video card appears with the title, channel and length.
3. Open the Transcript tab. If the video has captions, the text appears almost immediately. If it does not, the audio is transcribed instead; a progress note shows while that runs, usually under a minute.
4. Use the text. Toggle timestamps on or off, press Copy, or export a file. Click a timestamp to see where in the video that line is spoken.

Captions or speech-to-text: where the words come from

YouTube attaches captions to most videos. Some are written or corrected by the creator; many more are generated automatically by YouTube's own speech recognition. When either exists we fetch it directly, keep its timing, and show it as a readable transcript instead of a wall of caption fragments. This is fast and works for videos of any length.

Some videos have no captions at all: the creator turned them off, the video is too new, or YouTube's recogniser gave up on the audio. For these we fetch the audio track and run speech-to-text ourselves. The result has timestamps too, but it takes longer, roughly a minute for a typical video, and it is limited to videos under 30 minutes.

The transcript panel tells you which source you are looking at. If a video has both creator captions and automatic ones, the creator's version is preferred because it is almost always more accurate.

Timestamps

Every paragraph carries the time it starts at. That makes the transcript useful for more than reading:

• Find a moment. Search the text with your browser's Find command, then click the timestamp to jump to it in the video.
• Quote precisely. A quote with a timestamp can be checked by anyone, which matters for research, journalism and disputes about what was said.
• Skip ahead. Skim the transcript of a 90-minute talk, spot the section you care about, and watch only that part.

The timestamps toggle removes them when you just want clean prose to paste into a document.

Export formats

• TXT. Plain text, with or without timestamps. Opens anywhere. Free.
• SRT. The subtitle format most video editors and players accept. Use it to add captions to a copy of your own video, or to re-time captions in an editor. Pro.
• VTT. The web subtitle format used by HTML5 video players and most course platforms. Pro.
• Markdown. Headings and timestamps in a format that drops straight into Notion, Obsidian or a Git repository. Pro.

Copying to the clipboard is always free and is enough for most note-taking.

What people do with a transcript

• Study. Turn a lecture into notes you can annotate, or paste it into a flashcard tool.
• Research. Pull exact quotes with times from interviews, panels and testimony.
• Writing. Draft a blog post or newsletter from your own video without retyping it.
• Accessibility. Read a video in a place where you cannot play sound, or when the speaker is hard to follow.
• Translation. Paste the text into a translation tool to read a video in a language you do not speak.
• Search. Check whether a long video actually covers the topic you need before watching it.

Length and language limits

Guests and free accounts can transcribe videos up to 30 minutes long. Pro raises that to four hours for videos with captions. Speech-to-text is limited to 30 minutes on every plan, because transcribing audio is far more expensive than fetching captions; for a long uncaptioned video you would need to ask the creator to enable captions.

Captions come in whatever languages the creator provided, and automatic captions in the language YouTube detected. Speech-to-text handles most widely spoken languages and returns the words in the language spoken. Nothing is translated on our side.

When something goes wrong

• "That does not look like a supported link." Paste the full video address, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123xyz45. Playlist and channel links are not videos; transcripts work one video at a time.
• "This video is unavailable" or "private." Only public videos work, and only what YouTube shows to a signed-out visitor. Age-restricted videos and live streams are not supported.
• The transcript is empty or garbled. Music videos, videos with no speech, and heavily accented or overlapping speech produce poor results from any recogniser. Automatic captions can also be wrong; if the creator's captions exist, the panel uses them.
• "YouTube is rate-limiting us." Wait a moment and try again; this usually clears within a minute.
• You hit today's limit. Transcripts and summaries share a daily allowance. Sign up to raise it, or see pricing for Pro.

From transcript to summary, or to a file

The Summary tab uses the same transcript to write a TL;DR, a list of key points or a chapter breakdown, so you can decide in a minute whether a long video deserves an hour. The Download tab saves the video as an MP4 or the audio as an MP3 if you want a copy to keep.

A note on other people's words

Transcripts and summaries live on a public page for each video so that anyone with the link can read them. Sign in to make your pages private. Use transcripts for notes, study and fair quotation; do not republish someone else's video as text. Creators and rights holders can use the DMCA page to request removal of a page.