YouTube transcript
Paste a link and read the whole video as text — every line stamped with the second it was said. Free, and the first one needs no account.
No link handy? Read a 1-hour talk instead →
10 a day here · unlimited in the extension · no card
how
Getting one
- step 1Copy the video link. Any shape works — a full
youtube.com/watchURL, a shortyoutu.beone, an/embed/or/shorts/link, or the bare 11-character id. - step 2Paste it in the box. The transcript opens straight away. Videos up to four hours are fine — full lectures, conference talks and podcast episodes included.
- step 3Read it, search it, or take it.Click any line to jump the player to that second, search the text for the bit you need, or download the lot.
formats
What you can take away
Six of them, because the next tool along always wants a different one.
- TXT
- Plain text. Timestamps optional.
- MD
- Markdown with the source URL, for Notion, Obsidian or a prompt.
- SRT
- Subtitle file, for a video editor.
- VTT
- Web subtitles, for a player.
- CSV
- One row per line, for a spreadsheet.
- JSON
- Structured, for whatever you are writing.
quality
Raw captions, or the readable version
What YouTube generates automatically is timing data that happens to contain words: no full stops, no capitals, no paragraph breaks, broken into three-second fragments. Fine to read along with. Painful to actually read, and worse to quote.
One click turns it into writing — the same words and the same timestamps, with the sentences put back. Nothing is summarised and nothing is reworded, and the raw version stays one click away. Free accounts get one of these a day, Pro gets twenty.
no captions
When a video has none
A transcript here is the video's own caption track, cleaned up and timestamped — either the one the creator uploaded or the one YouTube generated. Most videos have one, so landing on a video with none is rarer than it sounds.
When one really has no caption track, we say so instead of guessing. Running the audio through speech recognition costs real money per minute, and we would rather not put that on everyone's price before anyone has asked for it. If you keep hitting videos like that,tell us — that is what moves it up the list.
limits
Printed on the box
Ten transcripts a day on this site. Unlimited inside theChrome extension, which reads them off the page you already have open — nothing to fetch, so nothing to meter.
AI summaries are counted separately: 3 a day on a free account, one a day without one. No credits, and no meter that drains faster on a long video — thefull list is on the pricing page.
Want the short version rather than the full text? The same page willsummarise it with chaptersoff the transcript it already has.
Paste a link.
The first one needs no account.