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Turn any YouTube video into clean, timestamped text in seconds. Copy it or download as TXT, SRT, or JSON. Free, no signup.
This free YouTube transcript generator pulls the captions straight from any public YouTube video and turns them into clean, readable text you can actually use. Paste a link, pick a language, and get the whole transcript with accurate timestamps, and no browser extensions, software, or account are required.
Whether you need a quick plain-text copy for notes, an SRT subtitle file for editing, or structured JSON for a script, everything exports in one click. Automatic (speech-recognition) captions come with word-level timing, while uploader-provided subtitles keep their original line timing.
Three steps, a few seconds.
Copy the YouTube video URL and paste it into the box above.
Press Get Transcript. The tool fetches the video's captions and displays the full text.
Switch languages if needed, then copy the text or export TXT, SRT, or JSON.
YouTube can show a transcript inside the player, but it stops there. Here is what each one gives you.
| YouTube "Show transcript" | This tool | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it works | Desktop only, inside the video page | Any device, just paste a link |
| Copying | Select and copy by hand; timestamps come along and get messy | One-click copy, with or without timestamps |
| Download | No download option | TXT, SRT, and JSON in one click |
| Languages | Switch tracks inside the panel | Pick any caption track; transcript reloads instantly |
| Subtitles for editing | Not available | Standard SRT export for any editor |
Everything you need to pull, read, and repurpose a YouTube transcript.
Per-line timing, plus word-level times on automatic captions for precise editing.
Original language, uploader subtitles, and auto-translated tracks, so you can pick any available caption.
Plain text for notes, SRT for subtitles, JSON for developers, one click each.
No account, no install, no watermark. Works on desktop and mobile browsers.
Choose the format that fits what you're doing next.
The full transcript as continuous, readable text, ideal for notes, summaries, and pasting into a doc.
Each line prefixed with its start time, so you can jump to the exact moment in the video.
Standard SubRip file you can drop into any video editor or upload back to a platform as captions.
Structured segments (and word-level times for ASR) for developers building apps, search, or summaries.
Most transcript sites hand you a few free extractions, then start counting tokens. This is the whole policy, with nothing held back for a paid tier.
There is no token counter, no trial window, and no watermark stamped on the files you export. A three-hour conference recording costs exactly what a two-minute clip costs. The transcript tool is free because the YouTube video cutter running alongside it is what pays for the servers.
That is decided by the video, not by this tool. YouTube stores up to two kinds of caption track, and the one a video happens to have sets the ceiling on how clean the text can be.
Typed or corrected by a human before publishing, so the text is already proofread.
Generated by speech recognition the moment a video is uploaded. Readable, rarely perfect.
Clear speech recorded on a decent microphone transcribes close to perfectly. A panel discussion with three people talking over a backing track is where automatic captions fall apart, and no transcript tool can fix that after the fact, because the words were never captured correctly in the first place.
When a video offers more than one track, pick an uploader-written subtitle track for the cleanest text and fall back to the automatic captions when that is all there is. Switch tracks any time from the language menu and the transcript reloads instantly, so it costs nothing to compare the two.
The three words get used interchangeably and they are not interchangeable. Knowing which one you actually need saves picking the wrong export.
Everything that was said, as one readable block of text. It is meant to be read on its own, away from the video. Export it as TXT.
The same words cut into short timed lines that appear over the picture. They assume you can hear the audio. Export SRT.
Subtitles plus the non-speech information a deaf or hard-of-hearing viewer needs: speaker labels, music cues, relevant sounds.
In practice: take the TXT when you want to read, quote or summarise; take the SRT when the text has to go back on top of a video. YouTube builds all three from the same caption track, which is why one video can give you every format here.
A transcript makes video content searchable, quotable, and reusable.
Need to save a piece of the video itself, not just the text? Use the YouTube Video Cutter to trim and download the exact clip.
There is no fixed language list to check against. Load a video and the menu fills with every caption track YouTube actually holds for it, in three flavours.
Automatic captions in whatever language the video was spoken in. Almost always present when there is speech.
Human-written tracks in one or more languages. Pick these when you can; they are the cleanest text on the page.
YouTube can machine-translate a caption track into a long list of other languages. Useful for gist, looser than the original.
Because the list is read from the video itself, a niche language a creator subtitled by hand shows up just as readily as a major one. Switching tracks reloads the transcript on the spot, so you can pull the same video in two languages without starting over.
Once you have the text, the moment it points to is usually worth keeping too. The online YouTube video cutter on the homepage trims that section out and hands it back as an MP4, or as MP3 if you only want the audio, under the same no signup rule as this page.
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