Video to Text

Convert any YouTube video to plain text you can paste anywhere. Free and instant.

YouTube and Shorts read the captions. TikTok and Reels are transcribed from the audio.

From spoken video to usable text

Video is a great way to explain and a terrible way to store information. You cannot paste a video into an email, search inside it with Ctrl+F, or quote it in a report. Converting a video to text fixes all of that in one step. This page takes any public YouTube link and returns everything that is said as plain text, in seconds and for free.

The output comes in two flavors. With timestamps on, every line shows when it is spoken, which is ideal for referencing and note-taking. With timestamps off, the words flow as continuous prose that pastes cleanly into Google Docs, Notion, WordPress or wherever your writing lives.

Text is the universal format

Once a video becomes text, everything downstream gets easier. Writers mine interviews for quotes. Marketers turn webinars into landing page copy. Analysts feed earnings calls into spreadsheets and language models. Accessibility improves too: text can be read by screen readers, skimmed by people in a hurry, and understood by anyone who cannot turn the sound on.

The conversion here is deliberately literal: you get the actual words, not a paraphrase, so nothing is lost or invented. When you do want the machine to think for you, the buttons under each result do it on this page: an AI summary with a timecode on every point, a question answered from the transcript, or a moment found by description. Batches of many links run here too, on a paid plan. Our Telegram bot is an optional extra for translation into another language and PDF export. Reading the plain text itself stays free.

How it works

  1. Paste a YouTube link into the field above.
  2. Press Convert to text and wait a few seconds.
  3. Toggle timestamps off for flowing prose, then copy the text or save the .txt file.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert a YouTube video to text?

Paste the link on this page and press Convert to text. The spoken words appear as text within seconds. Switch timestamps off to get clean paragraphs ready for pasting into a document.

Is YouTube to text conversion free?

Reading the text is free and needs no account: 3 videos a day and 10 a week, plus one AI summary a day for videos up to 1.5 hours. Copying, downloading TXT, SRT or VTT files and asking questions about a video are part of a paid plan, from $6.99 a month.

Can I turn a YouTube video into an article or blog post?

The text from this page is the raw material: everything said in the video, in order. Many writers paste it into their editor and rework it. If you want AI to do the first pass, the AI summary button on this page returns the key points with their timestamps, which makes a serviceable outline to write against.

Does it work for music videos and songs?

Only if the video carries a caption track with the lyrics. Many official music videos do. When a video has no captions at all, there is no text to extract and the page will say so.

What languages are supported?

Any language YouTube captions exist in, which is over a hundred. The text arrives in the original language of the video, and the AI summary is written in the language of the page you are on, so an English video summarised from a Spanish or Japanese page comes back in that language. For a full translation of the text itself, copy it into the translator you prefer.

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