If YouTube shows no “Show transcript” option, the video has no caption track, and tools that copy captions return nothing. Paste the link here and the audio itself is transcribed, so the missing captions do not matter.
YouTube’s transcript panel only shows captions that already exist. A video has none when the creator has turned captions off, or when YouTube’s automatic captions were never generated. YouTube’s own help page lists the usual reasons: the language is not supported by automatic captions, the video is too long, the sound quality is poor, the video starts with a long silence, or several people speak at once. Livestream recordings and videos uploaded in the last few hours often have no captions yet either. In all of these cases a caption extractor has nothing to extract, which is why it answers “transcript not available”. The fix is to transcribe the audio instead of looking for a caption file. That is what WhoScribe does with a YouTube link: it reads the audio of the public video and produces the text with speaker labels and timestamps. This is not a rare case in our own data. Of the last 69 YouTube videos that people paid WhoScribe to transcribe in full, 34 had no captions of any kind when we checked on 4 October 2026, and their median length was 68 minutes.
Before anything else
Thirty seconds on YouTube can save you the whole job. On a computer:
Click “…more” under the video to expand the full description. Some creators paste the transcript there, or link to one.
At the end of the expanded description, a “Show transcript” button appears when the video has captions. It opens the text beside the video, with timestamps (YouTube Help: View video transcripts).
Open the player’s Settings (the gear) and then Subtitles/CC. If any track is listed, even an auto-generated one or one in another language, the video does have captions, and the transcript can be shown in that language.
If none of the three turns anything up, the video has no caption track, so copying captions cannot work. YouTube’s help page on automatic captions lists the usual reasons. The way out is to transcribe the audio itself: on your own computer (below) or here, without installing anything.
The free route
If you are comfortable in a terminal, two free, open-source tools do the whole job on your own computer: yt-dlp downloads the audio of the video, and OpenAI’s Whisper turns that audio into text. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
python -m pip install -U "yt-dlp[default]" openai-whisperInstall ffmpeg as well (see above).
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 -o "audio.%(ext)s" "<URL>"Replace <URL> with the video link. -x keeps only the audio, and -o names the file audio.mp3 (without it, yt-dlp names the file after the video title). Only download videos you have the right to download.
whisper audio.mp3 --model turbo --output_format txtWhisper writes audio.txt next to the audio file. Use --output_format srt for subtitles with timestamps, and add --language Spanish (or another language) if Whisper guesses the language wrong.
| Model | Parameters | Name for --model | Required VRAM | Relative speed (vs large) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| tiny | 39 M | tiny |
~1 GB | ~10x |
| base | 74 M | base |
~1 GB | ~7x |
| small | 244 M | small |
~2 GB | ~4x |
| medium | 769 M | medium |
~5 GB | ~2x |
| large | 1550 M | large |
~10 GB | 1x |
| turbo | 809 M | turbo |
~6 GB | ~8x |
The README measured the relative speeds on English speech on an A100 GPU and notes that real-world speed varies with the language, the speaking speed and the hardware. It describes turbo as an optimised version of large-v3, faster with a minimal loss of accuracy, but not trained for translation.
Source: github.com/openai/whisper
What you get: a free, private transcript. What it costs: the first setup, your computer’s time on long videos, and a plain text file with no editor.
The no-install route
Paste the YouTube link into the box at the top of this page. WhoScribe fetches the audio and transcribes it on its own servers, so there is nothing to install and no GPU to own.
Paste the link. The first 5 minutes are free without an account, 15 with a free account. The whole file is $5, a one-time payment.
Paste a YouTube linkHow it works
Audio or video of any length; the free plan transcribes the first 15 minutes of each file. MP3, MP4, M4A, WAV, MOV and a dozen more.
Leave the language on automatic or set it for better accuracy. Turn on speaker recognition if you need to know who said what.
The transcript opens with clickable timestamps — read it and fix a name straight away. A free account keeps it and exports it as TXT; DOCX, PDF, SRT and VTT come with the unlimited plan.
FAQ
Because the video has no caption track. Either the creator disabled captions or YouTube did not generate automatic ones. YouTube lists unsupported language, a very long video, poor audio, a long silence at the start and overlapping speakers as the common causes.
Yes, by transcribing the audio. Paste the video link into WhoScribe; it does not look for captions, it listens to the audio and writes the text. The video has to be public.
No. Tools that copy YouTube’s captions depend on a caption track existing. When there is none they return an error or an empty result. Only speech-to-text on the audio works.
Up to 10 hours per video. Long lectures, podcasts, sermons, hearings and audiobooks are common here.
The first 5 minutes are free with no account and the first 15 minutes with a free account. One payment of $5 unlocks the whole video ($3 in most lower-income countries), with no subscription. Prices as of 4 October 2026.
Over 90 spoken languages, including many that YouTube’s automatic captions do not cover. The finished transcript can also be translated.
No. Only videos that anyone can open without signing in. For a video you own, download the file from YouTube Studio and upload it instead.
After it ends and the replay is published, yes. A stream that is still live cannot be imported.
No account, no card. See the transcript before you decide anything.
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