How it works
YouTube already stores captions for most videos — that's what powers the CC button and the transcript panel on youtube.com. This tool reads those captions, tidies them into something readable, and hands them to you in whatever format you need.
Step by step
- You paste a link. Any YouTube URL shape works, plus a bare video ID.
- We ask YouTube which caption tracks exist for that video, and in which languages.
- We fetch the track you want and convert it into clean text.
- Caption files are cut into fragments of a few seconds each. We stitch those back into paragraphs using sentence endings and natural pauses in speech.
What it doesn't do
It doesn't transcribe audio. If a video has no captions at all, there is nothing to fetch — no amount of retrying will produce one. It also doesn't summarise, rewrite, translate or "clean up" what was said. The words you get are exactly the words in the caption file, only re-flowed into paragraphs. That's deliberate: a transcript you can't trust to be verbatim isn't much use.
Why some videos fail
- No captions. The creator didn't add any and YouTube didn't generate any.
- Private, unlisted or deleted. If you can't watch it logged out, we can't read it.
- Age-restricted. These require a signed-in session, which we don't use.
- Temporary refusal. Occasionally YouTube throttles automated requests. Waiting a moment usually fixes it.
Speed
A video nobody has requested before takes about a second. After that it's cached, so the same video comes back more or less instantly for everyone. Transcripts never change once published, so a cached copy is always the correct copy.
Is it free
Yes, and there's no account, no email capture and no daily limit. If you want to check whether the service is currently working, the status endpoint reports it live.