YouTube Transcript Generator

YouTube shows one in its own interface — the "..." menu under a video, then "Show transcript" — but you cannot select it cleanly, it comes with timestamps glued to every line, and it does not exist on mobile. This tool gives you the same text in a usable form, in three formats.

Because it has no captions. Captions come either from the uploader or from YouTube's automatic speech recognition, and some videos have neither — music videos and very old uploads especially. When there is nothing to extract, no tool can invent it.

Auto-generated captions come from speech recognition: no reliable punctuation, no capitalisation, and confusion between similar-sounding words. Captions written by the uploader are accurate. We prefer written ones when both exist, and label the result so you know which you got.

If it was written by the uploader, yes. If it is auto-generated, check the passage against the video before quoting — recognition errors on names and technical terms are common, and they read as plausible.

A transcript is the text of someone else's work, and copyright applies to it. Using it to research, quote briefly with attribution, or understand a structure is normal practice. Republishing it as your own article is not.

They are cached briefly so that two people asking for the same video do not trigger two fetches. Nothing is attached to you, and nothing is kept long term.