YouTube Transcript Generator

Paste any YouTube URL and get the transcript in seconds. Works with videos, Shorts, and live archives. Free preview for one video per day.

No sign-up · 1 free transcript per day · We don’t store the URL

Last verified July 3, 2026

The 200-word preview — and how to unlock the full transcript

YouTube videos are longer than TikToks or Reels — a typical 10-minute video has around 1,500 words of transcript. On this free tool, you see the first 200 words (roughly 60–90 seconds of speech) so you can verify the video matches what you expected. To get the rest, sign up — free, no credit card, 60 minutes of full-app credit.

Being direct about why: we pay our upstream provider (Supadata) per request. At YouTube’s query volume, unlimited free transcripts would bankrupt the free tier. The competitors advertising “100% free, no limits” on this SERP mostly rate-limit silently at 5–20/day and just don’t tell you. We think the honest tradeoff is better: paste one URL a day free, sign up if you need more.

URL variants that work

Every YouTube URL format is accepted, including Shorts and live archives:

FormatWhere it comes from
youtube.com/watch?v=…Desktop URL (standard video)
youtu.be/…Share button shortlink
youtube.com/shorts/…Shorts (vertical short-form)
youtube.com/live/…Live stream archive
m.youtube.com/watch?v=…Mobile web
youtube.com/embed/…Embed URL (from an embedded player)

Copy the URL from wherever you found it — desktop address bar, mobile Share button, embedded player, or a link someone sent. All resolve to the same video.

When it fails — the honest short list

  • Private videos.No external tool can bypass YouTube’s auth requirement. If it’s your own video, either make it public or download from YouTube Studio and upload to our full app.
  • Region-locked videos. Rare, but if YouTube serves the video only in certain countries, our upstream may fail to fetch it.
  • Very new uploads.Auto-captions can lag 5–30 minutes after upload. Wait and retry.
  • Live streams in progress. Only ended-stream archives work. Wait for the stream to end plus a few minutes of post-processing.
  • Videos with captions disabled. If the creator explicitly disabled captions, YouTube has no track to serve. This is rare but happens for music-industry channels concerned about lyrics.
  • Very old videos (pre-2010ish).YouTube didn’t auto-caption uniformly before then.
  • Videos with no speech.Concert footage, music videos with lyrics only, silent films, gameplay without commentary. There’s nothing to transcribe.

The workaround for any of these: download the video (yt-dlp works for public content) and upload the file to our full video-to-text app. AI transcription runs on the audio directly, so it doesn’t need YouTube to have generated a caption track.

YouTube’s caption tiers — what you’re actually getting

YouTube surfaces one canonical caption track per video, and that track can come from three different sources with different quality:

  • Creator-uploaded captions— highest quality. Creators either upload verbatim scripts or edit auto-generated captions before publishing. Typically 96%+ accuracy. YouTube shows these without any “auto-generated” label.
  • Community-contributed captions — YouTube removed this feature for new videos in September 2020, but older videos still carry them where creators enabled community contributions. Quality varies wildly by contributor.
  • Auto-generated captions— the default fallback when nothing better exists. YouTube labels these as “(auto-generated)” in the caption selector. Quality: 94–98% for clear English, 88–93% for major non-English languages, lower for less-supported languages and heavily accented speech.

Our tool pulls the canonical track YouTube chose to surface. You get creator-uploaded captions if they exist, otherwise auto-generated — same as what you’d see if you clicked Show transcript on youtube.com.

Realistic accuracy ranges

Content typeWord accuracy
Clean English talk-to-camera (tutorials, vlogs)94–98%
Podcast interviews on YouTube (2–4 speakers)92–96%
Educational videos with technical terminology88–93% (proper nouns mis-heard)
Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Japanese88–93%
Less-supported languages (Arabic, Vietnamese, Thai)75–88%
Heavy background music / concert footage55–75%
Live archives (post-processed)85–92%
YouTube Shorts (clear English speech)92–97%

For deeper breakdowns by audio condition and language, see How Accurate Is Whisper. We don’t cite the “99% accuracy” claim common in competitor copy — it’s not sourced to a published benchmark on realistic YouTube audio.

Sign up to unlock the full transcript

Free account (no credit card, 60 minutes of full-app credit) unlocks:

  • Full transcripts, unlimited length
  • No 1/day rate limit
  • Batch YouTube URL processing
  • Export as .srt, .vtt, .docx, PDF, or JSON
  • Word-level timestamps in JSON (for LLM pipelines)
  • 99-language AI transcription when YouTube didn’t caption the video (rare, but the fallback exists)
  • Speaker labels when uploading videos through the full app

What to do with the transcript

  • Feed to Claude, ChatGPT, or Geminifor summarization, Q&A, or search across many videos. Copy the transcript, paste into your favorite LLM, ask what you want. Fastest-growing use case as LLM tooling matures.
  • Repurpose your own YouTube videosinto blog posts, newsletters, tweets, LinkedIn posts, or short quote graphics. One long-form video → 5–10 pieces of written content.
  • Cite in research or journalism— timestamp + quoted line + link back to the video. Handles the “can I quote this?” problem cleanly.
  • Study aid — grab lecture transcripts, search across course sessions, build searchable notes.
  • Accessibility— read videos silently when you can’t play audio, or feed to a screen reader.
  • Show notes for podcast episodes hosted on YouTube — auto-generate the description text before publishing.

How this page was verified

YouTube URL variant coverage was checked against every observed URL shape: standard watch, youtu.be shortlink, Shorts, live archives, mobile web, and embed URLs. The auto-caption vs creator-uploaded vs community-contributed tier system is documented in YouTube’s auto-caption Help article; community-contributed captions were removed for new videos in September 2020 per YouTube’s community contributions announcement. Accuracy ranges come from spot-checking 20 videos (5 clean English, 5 non-English major, 5 podcast interview, 5 Shorts) against YouTube’s own transcript panel and against creator-uploaded captions where available. We don’t cite the “99% accuracy” claim common on this SERP because we can’t source it to a published benchmark. The 1-per-day rate limit and 200-word preview are enforced server-side and documented here as configured in production. Competitor rate-limit behavior (silent 5–20/day caps) was observed empirically on 8 SERP pages during research; we don’t name individual vendors because their limits change.

Related guides

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I download the YouTube transcript as a file?

Yes. After the transcript loads on this page, click Copy transcript for plain text, or Download .txt for a file. Sign up for a free DeluxeScribe account and you also get .srt, .vtt, .docx, PDF, and JSON export with word-level timestamps — useful for subtitle work, video editing, and feeding to LLMs with precise timing.

Does YouTube have a built-in transcript feature?

Yes, but it's clumsy. On desktop: click the ... (More) below the video → Show transcript. A panel opens with timestamped auto-captions you can select and copy. YouTube doesn't offer a one-click download. That's why paste-URL tools like this one exist — same source (YouTube's auto-caption track), better ergonomics.

Why does the tool show only 200 words?

YouTube videos are longer than TikToks — a typical 10-minute video has ~1,500 words. Serving unlimited free transcripts at YouTube's query volume isn't sustainable for us (we pay our upstream provider per request). The 200-word preview lets you check quality; sign-up (free, no credit card) unlocks the full transcript. This is the honest tradeoff — most competitors advertise 'no limits' and silently rate-limit at 5-20/day.

Does this work with YouTube Shorts?

Yes. Shorts URLs (youtube.com/shorts/...) are supported explicitly. YouTube auto-captions Shorts the same way it captions regular videos, so success rate is 90%+ for Shorts with clear English speech. Very silent Shorts (no speech, just music) will return 'no captions available' — the video literally has nothing to transcribe.

Does this work with YouTube live streams?

Live archives yes, live streams in progress no. After a stream ends, YouTube post-processes auto-captions and the transcript becomes available within a few minutes to a few hours depending on stream length. Very recently ended streams (< 30 min ago) may return 'no captions available' — check back later. In-progress streams don't have a completed transcript track yet.

Can I transcribe YouTube videos I don't own?

For personal use — note-taking, research, journalism, accessibility, fair-use quotation — yes. Republishing someone else's transcript as your own content runs into copyright and YouTube's Terms of Service. Use good judgment: cite the video, quote briefly, credit the creator. We don't help with bulk scraping or content theft.

Are YouTube transcripts accurate?

For clear English talk-to-camera videos: 94-98%. For podcast/interview format on YouTube: 92-96%. For non-English (Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese): 88-93%. For less-supported languages: 75-88%. For music-heavy content or concert footage: 55-75% — models confuse lyrics for speech. Creator-uploaded captions (highest tier) are usually verbatim; auto-generated captions are what we get when the creator didn't upload their own. YouTube surfaces one canonical track per video; we pull that.

What languages does this support?

Whatever YouTube auto-captions, which is roughly 70 languages. English quality is highest (Whisper-large-v3 class); Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Italian are solid; less-common languages (Arabic, Vietnamese, Turkish, Thai, Hindi) work but with more errors. If YouTube didn't caption the video in your target language, no external tool can produce a transcript from YouTube's side.

Is there a rate limit?

One free transcript per 24 hours per IP address, no sign-up required. On the second attempt, we show a signup modal. Sign-up is free (60 minutes of full-app credit, no credit card) and lifts the rate limit. This is more honest than the 'free forever, no limits' claims common on this SERP — most competitors rate-limit silently at 5-20/day and just don't say so.

Can I feed the transcript to Claude or ChatGPT?

Yes — this is one of the fastest-growing use cases. Copy the transcript (Copy button) and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini for summarization, Q&A, or content generation. For batch workflows (transcribe → summarize → tag) at scale, sign up for a DeluxeScribe account — the paid tier includes an API and structured JSON export designed for LLM pipelines.