Paste any YouTube link and get the full transcript with timestamps you can click. No extension, no account for your first few extractions, and the text is yours to copy straight away.
3 free extractions per day, no signup needed. A free account raises that to 20 credits and unlocks SRT, VTT and TXT downloads.
Almost every YouTube video carries a caption track — either one the creator uploaded or one YouTube's speech recognition produced automatically. This tool asks YouTube for that track and lays it out as readable text.
youtu.be short link, a Shorts link, an embed link or the bare 11-character video ID all work.Nothing is stored against your name, because there is no account involved. The transcript itself is cached briefly so that re-reading the same video does not cost you another extraction.
The honest limit of any YouTube video to text tool is the caption track. If YouTube will not serve one, there is nothing to convert, and no tool can invent it without re-transcribing the audio itself.
| Video | Result |
|---|---|
| Public video with manual captions | Works. This is the best case — punctuation and speaker intent are usually accurate because a person wrote them. |
| Public video with auto-generated captions | Works. Expect speech-recognition errors on names, acronyms and overlapping speech. |
| Shorts and live replays | Works whenever a caption track exists for them. |
| Captions disabled by the uploader | Does not work. There is no track to read. |
| Private, deleted or region-locked | Does not work. YouTube refuses the video entirely. |
| Age-restricted | Does not work anonymously — the caption track sits behind sign-in. |
Auto-generated captions are a machine transcript of a machine transcript once you copy them elsewhere. For anything quoted publicly — an article, a citation, a subtitle file that ships — read the timestamped view and check the passages that matter against the video.
If you need the same thing for a whole channel, on a schedule, or as SRT and VTT files, that is what the API is for. Same extraction, same caption source, callable from your own code — see the API reference or the cookbook for working examples.
It is free and there is no signup for the first three extractions each day — paste a link and the transcript appears, with nothing to install. A free account raises the limit to 20 credits and adds SRT, VTT, TXT and JSON downloads through the API.
Any public video that has captions, whether the creator uploaded them or YouTube generated them automatically. Videos with captions disabled, private or unlisted-restricted videos, age-restricted videos and deleted videos cannot be read, because there is no caption track to fetch.
Yes. The default view shows every caption segment next to its timestamp, and each timestamp links to that exact moment in the video. The Copy button copies the transcript in whichever view you are looking at — timestamped lines or one plain-text paragraph.
It is the same caption track YouTube serves to its own player, unedited. Auto-generated captions carry the usual speech-recognition mistakes — names, jargon and crosstalk are the usual casualties — so proofread before publishing anything derived from them.
Not from this page — it is rate limited per visitor. The same extraction is available as a REST endpoint, so a channel or playlist can be processed in a loop with one API key.