Is it free?
Yes. Paste a link and read the transcript without an account. A free account adds downloads in every format, three files a day and 90 minutes of transcript a month.
Free YouTube transcript generator
Paste a link, get the text. If the video already has captions we pull them in seconds. If it does not — or they are wrong — we transcribe the audio properly.
- Works on videos with no captions at all
- Up to 10 hours per video, start to finish
- Speaker labels and timestamps
- Export TXT, SRT, VTT or DOCX
- No video upload, no software to install
Start a transcript
Drop your file and pick a language.
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Drop audio or video here
MP3, MP4, M4A, WAV, MOV and more
or paste a link
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Captions or real transcription: which one do you need?
Most YouTube transcript tools do one thing — they copy the captions YouTube already has. That is fast and free, and when the captions are good it is all you need. It also fails in five common situations. This is where the two approaches differ.
Your situation
Caption extractors
WhoScribe
Video has clean, human-written captions
Works, instantly
Same, instantly
Video has no captions at all
Nothing to extract
Transcribes the audio
Auto-captions are wrong (accents, noise, jargon)
Copies the errors
Transcribes from scratch
You need to know who said what
No speaker labels
Labels each speaker
Video is in another language
Only what is published
Transcribes and translates
A three-hour podcast or lecture
Usually truncated
Up to 10 hours in full
How it works
How to get a transcript from a YouTube video
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Copy the video link
Open the video on YouTube and copy the address from your browser. A share link works too.
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Paste it above
Drop the link into the box. We read the video without downloading it to your device.
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Read, copy or download
The text appears on screen. Copy it, or export TXT, SRT, VTT or DOCX with timestamps.
Why some YouTube transcripts come out wrong
YouTube generates automatic captions for most videos, and for a clearly recorded monologue in English they are usually fine. The trouble starts when the recording is not clean. Two people talking over each other, a strong accent, background music, technical vocabulary, a phone recording in a room with hard walls — automatic captions degrade quickly in all of these, and no extraction tool can improve them, because it is copying a file that is already wrong.
The second gap is coverage. Livestreams, videos published in the last few hours, private and unlisted uploads, and many small channels have no caption track at all. An extractor has nothing to copy and returns an empty result, which is why so many of them fail silently on exactly the videos people care about.
Real transcription reads the audio instead of the caption file, so neither of those situations stops it. It costs more compute and takes longer than copying a text file — a two-hour podcast is a few minutes of work, not a few seconds — but it produces a transcript where there was none, and a correct one where the captions were wrong.
This page does both. Paste a link and we take the captions when they exist and look usable. When they do not, the audio is transcribed instead, with speaker labels and timestamps, in the original language or translated into any of 90+ others.
What if the video has no captions?
Then the audio is transcribed. That is the main difference from tools that only copy YouTube's caption file — they return nothing for a video without captions.
What is the difference between a transcript and subtitles?
A transcript is the text of what was said, usually read as a document. Subtitles are that text cut into timed lines and saved as SRT or VTT so a player can display them. You can export either here.
How long can the video be?
Up to 10 hours per video. Long podcasts, lectures, debates and full livestream recordings are the normal case, not the exception.
Do I have to download the video first?
No. Paste the link and the audio is read directly. Nothing is downloaded to your device and no software is installed.
Can I get timestamps?
Yes. The transcript carries timestamps, and the SRT and VTT exports are timed line by line so you can jump to any moment.
Which languages are supported?
Over 90, and the transcript can be translated into any of them regardless of the language spoken in the video.
Can I see who said what?
Yes. Speaker labels separate the voices, which is what makes interviews, debates and panel discussions readable.
Try it with a link you already have
Paste a YouTube address and read the transcript. No account needed to start.