YouTube Transcript Extractor
Paste any YouTube link and get the video's full script in seconds — with clickable timestamps, a copy button, and downloads as plain text or SRT subtitles. Works with creator captions and YouTube's auto-generated captions, in every available language. Free, no login, no API key.
What you can do with a transcript
- Study how top videos in your niche hook viewers in the first 30 seconds
- Turn your own videos into blog posts, newsletters, or social threads
- Quote a video accurately, with a timestamp linking to the exact moment
- Export SRT subtitles for editing or translation
A note on ownership
Transcripts belong to the video's creator. This tool fetches them on demand for the person who asks — they are never stored as pages, never indexed, and never republished.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get the transcript of a YouTube video?
Paste the video's link or ID and the transcript appears in seconds, pulled from the video's caption tracks — including auto-generated ones. Copy it, download as text, or export SRT subtitles.
Does it work on videos without subtitles?
It works whenever the video has any caption track, including YouTube's auto-generated captions — available on the vast majority of videos.
Why do I sometimes get a "try again in a few minutes" message?
YouTube rate-limits transcript fetches and occasionally challenges bursts of requests. It's temporary — retrying after a few minutes usually works, and fetched transcripts are cached.
What's the difference between auto-generated and regular captions?
Regular captions were written or reviewed by the creator; auto-generated ones come from speech recognition — very good, with occasional misheard words and no punctuation.
Related: AI Title Rewriter · Tags & SEO · Thumbnail Downloader.
A transcript turns a video into text you can search, quote, translate, and reuse. This tool pulls the full caption track of any public YouTube video — including YouTube's auto-generated captions — and gives it back to you with clickable timestamps, plain-text and SRT downloads, and the word count and speaking pace.
How extraction works
Every YouTube video with captions carries one or more caption tracks: creator-uploaded subtitles, and for most videos an automatic track generated by YouTube's speech recognition, often in several languages. The tool reads the video ID from your link, fetches the list of available tracks, and retrieves the one you pick. Creator tracks read cleanly with punctuation and correct names; automatic tracks are very good but arrive without punctuation and occasionally mishear technical terms, so the language menu marks them clearly.
What you get back
The transcript arrives as timed segments. With timestamps on, every line links to that exact second on YouTube, which is what makes it useful for quoting and fact-checking. With timestamps off, it reads as flowing text for study or repurposing. You can copy either view, download plain text, or export an SRT subtitle file — the standard format editors and translation tools expect. The word count and words-per-minute figure tell you how dense the video is.
Fair use of transcripts
A transcript belongs to the video's creator. The tool fetches it for you on demand and shows it once; it is never stored as a page on this site, never indexed, and never republished. Reading a public video's captions for study, accurate quoting with a timestamp, accessibility, or translation is ordinary use. Republishing someone else's full transcript as your own content is not.
Why it sometimes asks you to retry
YouTube rate-limits caption fetching and occasionally challenges a burst of requests. When that happens the tool says so and asks you to try again in a few minutes; the limit clears on its own. Every successfully fetched transcript is cached, so popular videos load instantly regardless, and the tool has its own per-visitor limit to keep it fast and free for everyone.