Get the transcript of any YouTube video
Paste a link. Get clean, readable text in a second — with timestamps if you want them. Free, no sign-up, no email, no limits.
Works with youtube.com/watch, youtu.be, Shorts, Live and embed links — or a bare video ID.
A transcript tool that gets out of the way
Most YouTube transcript sites hand you a wall of three-second caption fragments, then ask for your email before letting you copy it. This one doesn't. Paste a link, get readable text, take it, leave.
Actually readable
Caption files are chopped into fragments. We merge them back into real paragraphs using sentence boundaries and pauses — without ever changing a word of what was said.
Every format you'd want
Plain text, timestamped text, SRT and WebVTT for editors, Markdown for notes, plus JSON and CSV if you're working with the data.
Every language the video has
If a video carries thirty caption tracks, you get all thirty in the picker — and we tell you which are human-written and which YouTube generated automatically.
Click to jump
Turn on timestamps and every line becomes a link into the video at that exact moment. Useful for finding the bit you half-remember.
Looking for something specific?
- YouTube to text — clean prose for notes, quoting and research.
- YouTube to SRT — subtitle files for Premiere, DaVinci, CapCut and friends.
- Download YouTube subtitles — every caption track a video has, in any language.
- Transcript with timestamps — timecoded lines you can cite and jump to.
- YouTube Shorts transcript — Shorts links, which most tools reject outright.
Frequently asked
Is it really free?
Yes. No account, no email, no per-day cap, no watermark.
Why does it say a video has no captions?
Because it doesn't have any. YouTube only auto-generates captions for some videos, and creators don't always add their own. There's no transcript to fetch in that case — this tool reads existing captions rather than transcribing audio.
Can I get transcripts for private or unlisted videos?
No. Only videos that are publicly viewable.
Do you store the transcripts?
Transcripts are cached so that a video already requested loads instantly for the next person. Nothing about you is stored — there are no accounts and no tracking of what you look up.