YouTube Transcript Generator — Copy Any Video's Transcript Free

Copy the YouTube video URL (looks like youtube.com/watch?v=abc123), paste it into the box above, and click Get Transcript. The full transcript loads in seconds. You can copy it to your clipboard or download as TXT, VTT (subtitle format), or JSON (with metadata). No browser extension, no signup, no payment.

YouTube generates automatic captions for most videos using speech recognition, even when creators haven't uploaded transcripts. Our tool works with both auto-generated and creator-uploaded captions. For videos with no captions at all (rare — usually music-only or completely silent), there's nothing to extract.

Five consistent use cases. Skim before watching. A 60-minute talk takes 5 minutes to skim if you have the transcript. Use the search (Ctrl+F) to find the parts that matter. Repurpose content. Blog posts, Twitter threads, newsletters, Reddit posts — all start from a transcript. Better than rewatching and typing up notes. Research and study. Quotes, citations, finding specific moments, fact-checking claims. A searchable transcript is more useful than the video itself for research. Accessibility. Read along while listening. Helps with audio quality issues, accents, and non-native speakers. Translation. Feed the transcript to a translation tool to get the content in another language. Better than YouTube's built-in translation which only does captions.

YouTube videos have two kinds of captions: creator-uploaded (manually written, often from a transcription service like Rev) and auto-generated (YouTube's speech-to-text creates these automatically). Both are exposed via YouTube's internal endpoints. Our tool fetches the caption track directly — same source YouTube's own player uses to display subtitles. No speech-to-text processing happens on our side, which means accuracy matches YouTube's captions exactly. For auto-generated English captions on clear speech, that's typically 85-95% accurate. For creator-uploaded transcripts, accuracy is usually 99%+ since humans wrote them. Languages supported: 60+, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, and many more. YouTube generates captions in the original language of the audio, plus translations into major languages when available.

It depends on what you want to do with it. **Plain text (TXT):** Best for note-taking apps (Notion, Obsidian, Evernote), AI summarization (paste into ChatGPT/Claude), reading, quoting. No timestamps. **Text with timestamps:** Best for citation ("at 3:45 they said..."), finding specific moments, syncing with the video. **VTT or SRT:** Best for adding captions to other video files, video editing workflows (Premiere, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve), web video players. **JSON:** Best for automation, building datasets, programmatic analysis. Includes timestamps, duration, and metadata.

We don't log the YouTube URLs you submit. We don't store the transcripts. We don't require account creation. We don't share video titles, channel names, or transcript content with anyone. When you paste a YouTube URL, our server fetches the caption track from YouTube and returns it to your browser. The transcript never lands on our disk — it's streamed through to you. No cache, no archive, no analytics tied to content. The only thing we count is total requests (to monitor capacity), and even that is anonymous.

Public and unlisted videos work — our tool uses YouTube's public caption endpoints which serve any video accessible without authentication. Truly private videos (set to "Private" in YouTube Studio) can't be accessed without logging into the owner's account, so we don't support those. If you have a private video you'd like to transcribe, the simplest workaround is to make it unlisted temporarily.

Yes — toggle "Include timestamps" before downloading. The output looks like: ``` [00:00:15] Welcome back to the channel [00:00:22] Today we're talking about... [00:00:45] First, let's cover the basics ``` Useful for citation, finding specific moments, syncing with the video, and adding captions to other videos.

YouTube's speech-to-text is good but not perfect. It struggles with: technical jargon (it'll phonetically guess "API" as "a pee"), strong accents, multiple speakers talking over each other, background music, and quiet mics. For best results, use videos that have creator-uploaded transcripts (these are usually manually corrected and very accurate). YouTube marks which transcripts are auto-generated vs uploaded on the video page.