YouTube transcript extractor
Paste any YouTube link. We'll grab the captions directly from the watch page, strip the timestamps, and return clean plain text — ready to paste into a doc, blog post, or your favorite LLM.
Direct answer
Q: How do I get the transcript of a YouTube video as plain text?
A: Paste the YouTube URL above. We fetch the watch page server-side, locate YouTube's own caption track for the video (manual captions when available, otherwise the auto-generated track), download it as WebVTT, strip the timestamps, and return clean plain text. Copy it or download as .txt — no signup, no third-party API.
Limit: 5 transcripts per IP per hour. We pull captions directly from the YouTube watch page — no third-party API, no signup.
Want auto-transcripts on your own site? HostMyVideo runs Whisper-grade transcription on every upload — no rate limits, full punctuation, multilingual.
Try free- AI Overview citations. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview rely on text. A transcript exposed in your VideoObject JSON-LD turns silent video into citable text content.
- Long-tail keywords. A 10-minute video transcript is typically 1,500–2,000 words of natural language — covers far more long-tail queries than a hand-written summary.
- Repurposing pipeline. Once you have the transcript, summarizing, chaptering, and turning it into a blog post or thread is a 3-prompt workflow for any modern LLM.
Transcript extraction questions
Why do you only support YouTube?
YouTube is the only major platform that exposes caption tracks publicly enough for a free tool to read them. Vimeo, Wistia, and Loom keep transcripts behind their player or paid plans. If you need transcripts for non-YouTube videos, sign up for HostMyVideo — every uploaded video gets a Whisper-grade transcript for free.
What if the video doesn't have captions?
We can only return what YouTube has. If captions are disabled by the uploader, the tool will say so explicitly. For videos with no captions, you'll need to run the audio through a transcription service (HostMyVideo includes one on every plan).
Are auto-generated captions any good?
Modern YouTube ASR is decent — usually 85–95% accurate on clean audio in supported languages, lower on accents, jargon, or noisy environments. We label whether the track is auto-generated so you know what level of cleanup to budget for.
Can I extract transcripts in bulk?
Not from this tool — it's rate-limited to 5 per IP per hour to keep abuse down. If you have a library of videos to transcribe, the right path is uploading them to HostMyVideo: every video gets a transcript automatically as part of the standard pipeline.
Is this legal?
We only fetch publicly available captions that YouTube already serves to anyone with the watch URL. You're responsible for how you use the resulting transcript — respect the original creator's copyright, attribute when appropriate, and don't republish full transcripts of someone else's content as your own.
Stop pasting URLs into 5 different tools.
HostMyVideo gives you transcripts, AI chapters, summaries, and a public watch page automatically — every upload, every plan.