Ever needed the words out of a YouTube video without sitting through 40 minutes of it? Paste the link, get the whole transcript, done. It reads the captions the video already carries, so what you get back is the real spoken text, timestamps and all.
Works on regular videos, Shorts, and live replays. Drop in a full youtube.com/watch?v=... URL, a short youtu.be/... link, or just the 11-character video ID. The tool figures out the rest.
Pick your language
Most videos ship more than one caption track. After the first pull, a language dropdown shows everything that’s actually available, auto-generated tracks included, and you can switch on the fly. Ask for Spanish, get Spanish. If a video only has one track, that’s the one you get.
Four export formats, one click
- TXT clean reading text, with or without timestamps
- SRT subtitle file ready for any video editor
- VTT the web-native caption format
- JSON every segment with its start time and duration, for when you’re feeding it into something else
There’s a search box too. Type a word and jump straight to where it’s said. Handy for long lectures when you only care about one part.
Why captions beat re-typing
A 20-minute talk is roughly 3,000 words. Transcribing that by hand is an afternoon. Here it’s a few seconds, because the caption data is already sitting on YouTube’s side. You’re just extracting it in a usable shape.
The transcript stays on this page until you leave. Copy it, download it, summarize it somewhere else, whatever you need. Nothing gets saved on our end.
Good to know
Not every video has captions. If the uploader disabled them and YouTube never auto-generated any, there’s nothing to pull, and the tool will tell you plainly instead of spinning forever. Auto-generated captions can have the odd typo or a missed word here and there, that’s YouTube’s speech model, not the extraction. For human-uploaded captions the accuracy is basically perfect.
FAQ
Does it work on any YouTube video?
Any public video that has captions, either uploaded by the creator or auto-generated by YouTube. Private, deleted, or caption-less videos can’t be pulled, and you’ll get a clear message when that’s the case.
Can I get the transcript in a specific language?
Yes. Once you load a video, the language dropdown lists every caption track it has. Pick one and the transcript refreshes in that language.
What’s the difference between TXT, SRT, and VTT?
TXT is plain reading text. SRT and VTT are subtitle files with timing, the kind you drop into a video editor or upload back to a player. SRT is the classic format; VTT is the modern web one. Same content, different packaging.
Do the timestamps stay accurate?
They come straight from YouTube’s caption data, so yes. In TXT you can toggle them off if you just want the words; SRT, VTT, and JSON always keep the timing.
Is there a length limit?
Videos up to about four hours work. Past that the transcript gets unwieldy and we cap it. For anything normal, you’ll never hit the limit.
Where does the transcript go after I close the tab?
Nowhere. It lives in your browser for the session and is gone when you leave. We don’t store transcripts or the links you paste.