YouTube transcript
Paste a link and read the whole video as text — every line stamped with the second it was said. Free, and the first one needs no account.
No link handy? Try it on a 1-hour talk →
Ten transcripts a day here · unlimited in the Chrome extension · no card
What you get
A transcript is only useful if you can act on it. These four things are the difference between a wall of text and something you can work from.
Every line timestamped
Each line carries the second it was said. Click it and the player jumps there — the part that gets lost the moment you paste a transcript anywhere else.
Copy or download
Take the whole thing as Markdown or plain .txt, with or without the timestamps, and paste it into Notion, Obsidian, a doc or your own prompt.
No account for the first one
Paste a link and read the transcript — no sign-up, no card, nothing to install. Every summariser worth comparing us to asks you to register before it shows you anything.
Search before you read
The text is searchable, so a two-hour interview turns into "find the bit about pricing" instead of dragging the scrubber around.
How to get a transcript of a YouTube video
1. Copy the video link
Any form works — a full
youtube.com/watchURL, a shortenedyoutu.beone, or a Shorts link.2. Paste it above
The transcript opens in the Transcript tab. Videos up to four hours are fine — lectures, conference talks and full podcast episodes included.
3. Read, search, or take it with you
Click any line to jump to that moment in the video, or copy and download the whole transcript and keep working elsewhere.
Want the short version instead of the full text? The same page gives you anAI summary with chapters from the same transcript, in one pass.
What YouTube's own transcript panel doesn't do
YouTube shows a transcript for most videos, and for reading along that is enough. Three things it leaves to you.
| Here | YouTube's panel | |
|---|---|---|
| Taking it with you | Copy or download, Markdown or .txt | Select by hand, timestamps come along uninvited |
| Making sense of it | Summary, chapters and follow-up questions beside it | Raw text only |
| Coming back later | Saved in your history | Open the video again |
Videos without subtitles
A transcript here is the video's own caption track, cleaned up and timestamped. Most videos have one — including the auto-generated captions YouTube writes for anything it can make out — so hitting a video with none is rarer than it sounds.
When a video really has no caption track at all, we can't turn it into text yet. Running the audio through speech recognition costs real money per minute, and we'd rather not put that on the price before we know people want it. If you keep landing on videos like that,tell us — that is what moves it up the list.
Limits, printed on the box
Ten transcripts a day on this site, and unlimited inside theChrome extension, which reads them straight from the page you're already on. AI summaries are counted separately — 3 a day on the free plan once you sign in, one a day without an account.
No credits, no meter that spends faster on long videos. Numbers you can hold in your head, and thefull list is on the pricing page.
Get the transcript
Paste a link — the first one needs no account.