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Get video transcripts in three simple steps
Copy any YouTube video URL from your browser and paste it into our search field. Works with any video that has publicly available captions.
We fetch the public captions and display them in an easy-to-read format with timestamps. Search through the transcript or jump to specific moments.
Copy the transcript to your clipboard or export it in various formats. Use it for notes, research, content creation, or accessibility.
We only access publicly available caption data from YouTube. We do not download, store, or redistribute any video content. All transcript data is fetched directly from YouTube's public API and displayed to you.
This service respects YouTube's terms of service and only works with videos that have public captions enabled by the video owner.
The word "transcription" is misleading here, and the distinction matters. This tool does not listen to audio and it does not run speech recognition. It retrieves a caption track that already exists on YouTube and reformats it for reading, searching and export.
That is why results come back in seconds rather than minutes, why there is no upload, no queue and no account, and why the service is free. It is also the source of every limitation below: if a video has no caption track, there is nothing to retrieve, and no setting on our side changes that.
A video can carry two kinds. Uploader captions are written or reviewed by whoever published the video, and they are usually accurate, properly punctuated, and correctly attributed between speakers. Automatic captions are generated by YouTube's own speech recognition. They are remarkably good on clear single-speaker audio and noticeably worse on proper nouns, technical vocabulary, crosstalk and strong accents. Where both exist we prefer the uploader's.
In practice there are four causes. The uploader disabled captions entirely. The video is very new and automatic captions have not finished generating, which can take from minutes to a few hours. The video is private, unlisted or age-restricted, so the caption track is not publicly readable. Or it is a music video — these ship without captions far more often than any other category, which surprises people. An error message naming one of these is a statement about the video, not a failure of the tool.
Where a video carries caption tracks in several languages, each appears in the language selector and you can switch between them without reloading. What you are choosing between are tracks YouTube already holds; we do not translate text ourselves, so a language absent from the selector is simply one the video does not have.
Every line stays linked to its timestamp, which makes verification cheap. If you are going to quote something — in an article, a citation, a subtitle file that will be published — click the timestamp and listen to those few seconds. Automatic captions infer punctuation rather than hear it, so sentence boundaries drift, and a misplaced full stop can change what a sentence appears to claim.