Turn a YouTube video into text in seconds. No upload, no waiting for audio processing.
Transcription without the transcription wait
The usual way to transcribe a video is painful: download the file, upload it to a transcription service, wait while a model chews through the audio, then pay per minute for the result. For YouTube videos all of that is unnecessary, because nearly every public video already has a text track sitting on YouTube's servers.
This tool goes straight to that track. Paste a link and the complete transcription appears on this page in a few seconds, whether the video is three minutes or three hours long. It costs nothing because there is no heavy audio processing to pay for. Copy the result into your notes or download it as a .txt file.
When speed matters more than anything
Content teams transcribe interviews minutes before a publishing deadline. Podcasters turn a YouTube upload into show notes while the episode is still fresh. Students transcribe a lecture right before the exam instead of rewatching it at double speed. Because there is no per-minute billing, you can transcribe as many videos as you need, within a fair hourly limit that resets automatically.
Need the transcription to do more than sit in a file? The buttons below every result work on this page: an AI summary that compresses the video into key points with timecodes, a question answered from the transcript, a moment found by description, and batches of links on a paid plan. Our Telegram bot is an optional extra for translation and PDF export, and for videos that genuinely have no captions at all, since it can work from the audio itself.
How it works
Paste the YouTube link into the field above. There is no file to upload.
Press Transcribe. The text is ready in seconds because the caption track already exists.
Copy the transcription or download it as .txt, free and without an account.
How can I transcribe a YouTube video for free?
Paste the link on this page and press Transcribe. Because YouTube videos already carry a caption track, the transcription is ready in seconds and costs nothing to read: 3 videos a day and 10 a week without an account. You do not need to record anything, upload a file or convert any audio yourself.
How long does it take to transcribe a video?
A few seconds, regardless of video length. Traditional transcription tools process the audio in real time or slower. This tool reads the existing caption track instead, so a three-hour podcast takes about as long as a three-minute clip — the wait is one network round trip, not hours of speech recognition.
How accurate is the transcription?
If the creator uploaded their own captions, accuracy is essentially perfect, because you are reading the same file. Auto-generated captions are produced by speech recognition and usually land above 90 percent for clear speech; heavy accents, crosstalk or loud music pull that down, and technical terms are the usual casualties.
Can I transcribe a YouTube video to SRT or VTT?
Yes. On a paid plan the transcript downloads directly as TXT, SRT or VTT from the buttons under the text. Without a plan you can still read the transcript here and rebuild a subtitle file with our free in-browser converters.
Do I need to download the video first?
No. You never touch the video file. Paste the public link and the transcription happens server-side in seconds, reading the caption track YouTube already stores. Nothing is installed on your device, no browser extension is involved, and the video itself is never downloaded — by you or by us.