Paste a YouTube link and start reading free, no sign-up — the first 15 minutes with a free account. Need the whole thing — a two-hour podcast, lecture or interview? Unlock the complete transcript for $5, one payment, no subscription. Unlike caption extractors, WhoScribe transcribes the audio itself, so it works on videos with no captions and adds timestamps, speaker labels and downloadable files.
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YouTube transcription
Copy the public YouTube URL, paste it into the tool above and choose the spoken language or automatic detection. WhoScribe downloads the audio, transcribes the speech and returns editable text with timestamps. You can then copy it or export TXT, SRT, VTT or DOCX. Because it reads the audio, the video does not need existing captions.
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.
How it works
Open the video on YouTube and copy the address from your browser. A share link works too.
Drop the link into the box. We read the video without downloading it to your device.
The text appears on screen. Copy it, or export TXT, SRT, VTT or DOCX with timestamps.
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.
WhoScribe does the second. Paste a link and we transcribe the audio itself, with speaker labels and timestamps, in the original language or translated into any of 90+ others.
Original WhoScribe data
We analysed every YouTube link submitted to WhoScribe from 15 August to 21 September 2026. The figures are aggregate and contain no video titles, URLs, transcript text or personal data.
Snapshot taken on 22 September 2026 from production job records. A completed job means WhoScribe produced transcript output; it is not an accuracy score. The completion rate is 1,597 completed jobs divided by 1,614 submitted jobs. Duration is the median duration_seconds among completed jobs with a measured duration. Language count includes automatic detection and user-selected language codes recorded with completed jobs.
Published · last updated · Publisher: WhoScribe
The first 5 minutes of any video are free with no account, and the first 15 minutes with a free account. For the whole video — a two-hour podcast, lecture or interview — unlock the complete transcript for $5. One payment per video, no subscription. A free account also keeps your transcripts, adds TXT download and 90 minutes of transcript a month.
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.
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.
Up to 10 hours per video. Long podcasts, lectures, debates and full livestream recordings are the normal case, not the exception.
No. Paste the link and the audio is read directly. Nothing is downloaded to your device and no software is installed.
Yes. The transcript carries timestamps, and the SRT and VTT exports are timed line by line so you can jump to any moment.
Over 90, and the transcript can be translated into any of them regardless of the language spoken in the video.
Yes. Speaker labels separate the voices, which is what makes interviews, debates and panel discussions readable.
Yes. Under the transcript, one click turns the video into a blog post, study notes, podcast show notes or YouTube chapters with timestamps, written only from what was said in the video. You can also ask questions about it. A free account gets three AI requests per video; an unlocked video or Pro has no limit. On a video that is only partly unlocked, the result covers the part you can read.
Paste the address and we fetch the audio. The transcript is the same wherever it came from.
Paste a YouTube address and read the transcript. No account needed to start.
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