YouTube Transcript Generator

Paste the video link above and press Get the transcript. The words come back in paragraphs beside the player, with a timestamp at the head of each if you tick that box — copy the lot or download it as a .txt. YouTube itself also has Show transcript in the description on desktop, but that is a box on the watch page, not a file you can keep.

This page is free — no signup, no watermark, no daily cap. Paste any public video, Short or live replay and take the whole transcript. YouTube’s own Show transcript is free too; the slow part is copying it out by hand, which this skips.

The words spoken in the video, written out. On YouTube that is the caption track: the uploader’s own if they published one, otherwise the auto-generated track YouTube makes for most videos. This page fetches that track and tidies it into paragraphs you can read, search, copy or save. Auto captions are usually good but not perfect — expect the odd misheard name and no punctuation.

Almost. Subtitles and captions are the same words timed to the picture, shown line by line on the video. A transcript is those words as a document — paragraphs you can read without watching. This tool turns YouTube’s caption track into that document.

Paste the link here — the page works in a phone browser the same as on a computer. YouTube’s own app buries Show transcript in the description, and on some phones it is missing. A link into this page is the reliable way on a phone.

The video has no captions. That happens with some music videos, brand-new uploads YouTube has not processed yet, videos whose uploader switched captions off, and live streams before the replay is ready. If YouTube has nothing, this tool has nothing either, and it says so.

Reading them is free. Publishing them is another matter — the words belong to the creator, same as the video. Fine for notes, quotes with credit, study and accessibility. Republishing a full transcript as your own article or video is not. When in doubt, ask the uploader.

No. ChatGPT cannot watch a YouTube video or read its captions. People paste a transcript in and ask it to summarise — that is summarising, not transcribing. Get the words here first, then paste them into ChatGPT if you want a summary.

Yes — tick the box and each paragraph starts with the time it begins at, in the same [1:02:03] form the video player uses. It applies to what you see, copy and download alike, so untick it for clean prose.

Any language YouTube has captions in. The tool asks for English first and, if the video has none, takes the first language YouTube lists — the result names which one you got. Unlike the PDF converter, plain text has no font limits, so Japanese, Hindi and Arabic transcripts come through as they are.