Reel transcript, from the sound rather than a caption file
A YouTube transcript is a file YouTube already publishes. Instagram publishes no such thing, so an Instagram video transcript has to be made by listening: the reel is fetched, its audio transcribed by speech recognition, and the result laid out as text with the time of every phrase beside it. That is why this takes a few seconds rather than an instant, and why it works on reels that have no on-screen captions at all.
Once the text exists, the reel behaves like every other video on this site. Search inside it for the sentence you half-remember. Read it instead of watching it. Press AI summary for the key points with the minute each was made, ask a question and get an answer drawn from what was said, or save the whole thing as a file.
Turning Instagram to transcript, and what for
Creators run their own reels through it to reuse a video as a caption, a newsletter paragraph or a script for the next one. Marketers read a competitor's whole feed as text in a few minutes. Researchers and journalists want a quotation to be exactly what was said, with a timecode attached. People learning a language read along with a native speaker at their own pace. And anyone who has been sent a five-minute reel can find out what is in it without watching five minutes of it.
What to expect: the reel has to be public, the language is detected automatically, and there is a fifteen-minute ceiling on any one video — far above what a reel usually runs to, and refused before anything is spent when a video is over it.
- A whole list at once. On a paid plan, paste any text with reels, TikToks and YouTube links mixed together and the batch runner transcribes and summarises every one of them in a single run, then answers one question across the lot.
- TikTok too. The same pipeline reads TikTok, share links included — see the TikTok transcript page.
Subtitles from a reel
Every line carries its timing, so the transcript can leave as a subtitle file rather than as prose: Download .srt or Download .vtt under the transcript, with the timings preserved for an editor or for the web. A plain .txt is free once a day; SRT and VTT come with a paid plan. If you only need to change the format of a file you already have, the VTT to SRT and SRT to TXT converters run in your browser and upload nothing.