YouTube Transcript Extractor
Paste a link, get the full transcript. Copy it, save it, or feed it to your favorite AI — free.
Why Use Our YouTube Transcript Tool?
How to Get a YouTube Video's Transcript
Paste a YouTube link
Copy the URL of any YouTube video or Short — regular links, youtu.be short links, and Shorts all work.
Pick a language and extract
Choose the caption language you want and hit Get Transcript. We pull the video's captions — manual ones when the creator added them, auto-generated otherwise.
Copy or download the text
Copy the clean, plain-text transcript with one click and paste it anywhere — notes, docs, or an AI chat. Sign in free to save it as a .txt file.
What People Do With Transcripts
YouTube already shows transcripts. Why use this?
It does, and if you are at a desktop and only want to read along, the built-in panel is fine — click the …more button under a video, then Show transcript. The friction starts the moment you want the text somewhere else.
| YouTube’s panel | This tool | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it works | Desktop web only. The transcript panel is missing from the YouTube mobile apps and from Shorts. | Any browser, including mobile, and Shorts links work the same as regular videos. |
| What you get | A scrolling panel with a timestamp on every line, which you have to select by hand and which pastes with the timestamps embedded. | Clean plain text with the timestamps already stripped, ready to paste straight into a document or an AI chat. |
| Getting it out | No copy button and no export. You drag-select the panel and hope the selection doesn't jump as the video plays. | One-click copy, or download as a .txt file with a free account. |
| Languages | Switchable, but buried behind the panel's overflow menu, and it resets between videos. | Pick the caption language before you extract; falls back to the closest available track. |
Manual captions vs auto-captions
Every transcript on YouTube comes from one of two places, and the difference matters more than most people expect.
Manual captions
A real caption file the creator uploaded, or one a human typed. These carry proper punctuation, correct spelling of names and jargon, and speaker changes. Educational channels, news outlets and larger productions usually have them. If a video has manual captions, that is what you get, and you can generally quote it.
Auto-generated captions
YouTube’s speech recognition, produced automatically for most uploads. Good enough to read and to summarize, but it arrives as an unbroken lowercase stream with no punctuation, and it reliably mangles proper nouns, acronyms and technical terms. Accents, overlapping speakers and background music all make it worse.
The practical rule: auto-captions are fine for understanding a video — feeding it to an AI for a summary, skimming a two-hour talk for the part you need, searching for a phrase. For quoting someone in something you publish, check the passage against the audio first. Recognition errors in auto-captions are confident and silent; nothing flags the word it guessed wrong.
Want the Video, Not Just the Words?
BlackHole also downloads the videos themselves — up to 4K with BlackHole Pro. Transcript today, video library tomorrow.
Try the YouTube Downloader