Free YouTube Transcript Generator

Paste a YouTube video or Shorts link and get the full transcript in seconds, as readable paragraphs or line by line with timestamps. No sign-up, no extension.

Free, no sign-up. Works with public videos that have speech.

How to get the transcript of a YouTube video

  1. 1

    Copy the video link

    On YouTube, click Share and copy the link. Regular videos, Shorts and live replays all work, on desktop or mobile.

  2. 2

    Paste it above and click Get transcript

    We read the video’s captions, including YouTube’s auto-generated ones, and clean them up.

  3. 3

    Copy or download

    Switch between clean paragraphs and a timestamped version, then copy the text or save it as a .txt file.

What creators do with a YouTube transcript

  • Study why a video worked: read the first 30 seconds of a top video in your niche on one screen and see exactly how the hook and the promise are built.
  • Turn a video into posts: use the transcript as the source for a LinkedIn post, an X thread, a newsletter or a carousel instead of starting from a blank page.
  • Quote accurately: pull exact lines for show notes, articles or research, with the timestamp to link back to the moment.
  • Write captions and chapters: use the timestamped version to draft chapters, descriptions and on-screen captions faster.
  • Search your own back catalogue: keep transcripts of your videos in one document so you can find what you said, and when, without rewatching.

Why use this instead of YouTube’s own transcript panel?

YouTube can show a transcript under many videos, but it is built for following along, not for reusing the text. It comes as short caption fragments with a timestamp on every line, and copying it cleanly takes several steps.

  • One click to copy the whole transcript, without the timestamps getting in the way.
  • Sentences are joined into readable paragraphs instead of 3-second caption fragments.
  • Download as a .txt file, and it works the same on your phone.
  • Works the same for YouTube Shorts and live replays as for regular videos.

Auto-generated vs creator-uploaded captions: how accurate is the transcript?

A YouTube transcript is only as good as the captions behind it, and there are two kinds. Some creators upload their own caption file, written by hand or by a captioning service and checked before publishing. These are usually close to word-perfect, with proper punctuation and correctly spelled names.

Most videos rely on YouTube’s automatic captions, produced by speech recognition. They are often good for clear speech in a quiet room, but accuracy drops with background music, several people talking over each other, strong accents, fast speech and specialist vocabulary. Names of people, brands and products are the most common mistakes, and punctuation can be missing or placed in odd spots.

You can see which kind a video has in YouTube’s player: open the subtitles menu, and automatic tracks are labelled “auto-generated”. Before you quote a line, publish a statistic or cite a name from an auto-generated transcript, use the timestamp to jump to that moment and listen once. It takes seconds and saves you from repeating a mistake the speech recognition made.

Using someone else’s transcript responsibly

A transcript makes it easy to borrow ideas, and that is fine: studying how others structure a video is how most creators learn. What is not fine is publishing another creator’s words as your own. When you quote, keep the quote short, name the creator and link to the video. When you are inspired by a video, take the structure or the angle and make the content yours, with your own examples, opinions and experience.

Made by CreatorsCompanion

CreatorsCompanion is an AI content repurposing app for creators. It turns one idea, link or video into drafts for Instagram Reels and TikTok, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, email newsletters and Instagram carousels, in your own voice and language, each built on one of 15 named content structures.

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Frequently asked questions

Yes. You can get up to 10 new transcripts a day without an account. Videos someone has already transcribed load instantly and don’t count toward that limit. There is no watermark.
Yes. Paste a Shorts link (youtube.com/shorts/…) the same way as a regular video.
The tool reads the captions YouTube has for the video, including auto-generated ones. If a video has no captions at all (for example music without lyrics, or captions turned off by the creator), there is nothing to extract and you’ll see a message saying so.
You get the captions in the video’s own language, whatever it is. The detected caption language is shown under the transcript. The transcript is not translated; if you want a summary in another language, use the YouTube Video Summarizer.
We never download the video. We keep a copy of the public transcript so the next request for the same video is instant, and a one-way hash of your IP address to enforce the daily limit. No account, email or name is collected.
Yes. CreatorsCompanion takes the same YouTube link and writes a LinkedIn post, an X thread, a Reel or TikTok script, a newsletter and an Instagram carousel in your voice. The free plan includes 1,000 tokens a month.

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