YouTube to Transcript
Full transcript and a short summary of any YouTube video, in most languages.
Ready in seconds, and yours to copy, download or paste into an AI chat.
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How to get a transcript from a YouTube video
Paste the YouTube URL
Copy the URL of the video and drop it into the field above.
Click Generate Transcript
It takes a few seconds, however long the video runs.
Get your transcript for free
It opens right there on the page. Copy or download it.
What a transcript is good for
Read a lecture, quote a talk, study a language, or hand the whole thing to a model.
- Notes from a talk or a lecture
- An hour of video becomes a page you can skim. Keep the sentences that mattered, in the speaker's own words.
- Quotes you can cite
- Copy the exact wording instead of paraphrasing from memory. Check what was actually said before you publish it.
- Language practice
- Follow the text while the video plays and look up what you did not catch. Reading and listening together is how a fast speaker becomes understandable.
- Feed it to ChatGPT or Claude
- AI assistants read text, not video. Paste the transcript in and ask for a summary, a translation, the list of steps, or one answer buried in a two hour talk.
- Instructions you can follow
- Tutorials hide their steps in the middle. In text you find the setting or the number without scrubbing back and forth.
- Reading instead of watching
- Text works with the sound off, on a bad connection, and faster than the video plays.
What to do with it in an AI chat
Paste the transcript into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and ask for one of these.
Notes from the whole talk
The key points and nothing else
A summary, as short as you like
Answers to your questions about it
The best quotes, word for word
A quiz to test yourself
Background on what was mentioned
A meme, a thread, an infographic
Chapters for your own upload
A translation into any language
Try it right now
Paste a YouTube video URL and get the full transcript in seconds.
Frequently Asked Questions
Paste the URL into the field at the top of this page and press the button. The transcript comes back in a few seconds.
Free, and no sign up. Each visitor gets a modest number of transcripts an hour, which is what keeps the tool up for everyone.
Yes. Our addresses mirror YouTube's own, so with a video open you can replace youtube.com in the address bar with our host and keep everything after it. The transcript opens on the same video, and nothing is copied.
No. We read the subtitles the video already carries, written by the author or generated by YouTube. Seconds instead of minutes, and a video without subtitles has nothing to read.
As accurate as the subtitles themselves. Author-written ones are usually exact. Auto-generated ones handle clear speech well and miss names, jargon and crosstalk, so check a quote against the video before publishing it.
That is what most people do with it. Copy the text, paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other assistant, and ask for a summary, a translation, or the answer to one question about a long talk. The video itself is not something they can watch, the transcript is something they can read.
On a computer, expand the description under the video and look for Show transcript. It shows up only when the video has subtitles, and on a phone it is buried deeper.
Most languages. Whatever the video was subtitled in is what comes back, so a talk in Spanish gives you Spanish.
Any public video with subtitles, written by the author or generated by YouTube. Without subtitles there is nothing to pull, and no tool can invent it.
A channel can switch subtitles off, and auto-generated ones do not exist for every language or every upload. Worth checking the URL too, since a playlist address can carry a different video id.
No account, and we do not ask who you are. Fetched transcripts are cached, so the next person asking for the same video costs nobody another trip to YouTube.
Not here. You get the words as plain text, to copy or download. Subtitle files with their timings are a different job.
That is between you and whoever published the video. Subtitles are part of someone elseโs work, so treat a transcript as you would the video.