Is this YouTube transcript generator free to use?

Transcripts already on the site are free to read, with no account and no watermark. Generating a new one spends credits, and a new account starts with some to try it on.

Do I need to create an account?

Not to read a transcript that already exists. To generate a new one, yes — that is the part that costs us something. An account also keeps your workspace searchable across devices.

Can I get timestamps in the transcript?

Yes — there is a toggle for it. Turn it off for clean prose, turn it on when you need to find the moment in the video again.

What formats are supported?

Plain text, Markdown, SRT and VTT. SRT and VTT carry real timecodes, so they drop straight into video editing software.

What if the video has no captions?

Most YouTube videos have captions, auto-generated or uploaded, and those come back instantly at a flat rate. If a video genuinely has none, we transcribe the audio directly — slower, and priced per minute.

Does it work in languages other than English?

Yes. Whatever caption languages the video offers, you can pick from — and you can translate the result into another language afterwards.

YouTube Transcript Generator

The full text of any YouTube video, with or without timestamps, ready to copy or download.

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Try one

19 min

But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1

3Blue1Brown

15 min

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Stanford

6 min

How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk | Will Stephen | TEDxNewYork

TEDx Talks

14 min

Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator | Tim Urban | TED

TED

Why use this YouTube Transcript Generator

Clean text, not caption soup

Caption fragments are stitched into sentences, so what you copy reads like writing rather than a subtitle file.

TXT, SRT, VTT or Markdown

Download the format the next tool expects — subtitles for an editor, plain text for a document.

Timestamps optional

Keep them for citing a moment, drop them for pasting into a draft. Same transcript, one toggle.

Search inside it

Find the line you half-remember, then click it to hear it said.

Who it is for

Content teams

Turn a published video into a blog post, a newsletter section and a set of social captions from one source of text.

Accessibility work

Start from a real transcript instead of auto-captions, then fix the handful of words a machine always gets wrong.

Anyone taking notes

Keep the wording exact. Paraphrasing from memory is where quotes quietly change meaning.

How to use YouTube Transcript Generator

01
Paste the YouTube link
Any public YouTube URL works — full links, short youtu.be links, and links with a timestamp attached.
02
Choose your format
Plain text, Markdown, SRT or VTT, with timestamps on or off.
03
Copy or download
The full transcript appears in seconds, ready to copy or download as a file.

The full text of any YouTube video, in one paste

Paste a link and the whole transcript comes out in one step: clean text, stitched into sentences, ready to copy or download.

You choose whether timestamps come along. Plain text is what you want when you are feeding a model or quoting a passage; timestamped output is what you want when you need to find the moment again. Both are one toggle apart.

Formats that fit what you are doing next

Plain text for pasting into a document or a prompt. Markdown when you want the structure preserved. SRT and VTT when you are working with subtitles and need real timecodes that video software will read.

The transcript stays synced to the player, so you can click any line to hear exactly how something was said. That matters more than it sounds — auto-generated captions get names and technical terms wrong, and hearing the audio is the fastest way to catch it.

Built for volume, not just one video

Transcripts are cached, so a video someone has already pulled comes back instantly. If you work through a lot of videos — a course, a channel, a research corpus — that difference compounds.

Everything stays in your library once you sign in, and the library is searchable across the full text of every transcript, not just titles. Finding the video where someone said a specific phrase takes one search.

Frequently asked questions

Get a transcript in seconds

Paste the link and the text is ready before you have finished reading this.

Generate a transcript