Get the transcript of a YouTube Short
Paste the /shorts/ link exactly as you copied it. No converting, no reformatting.
Works with youtube.com/watch, youtu.be, Shorts, Live and embed links — or a bare video ID.
Shorts links work as-is
A Short's URL looks like youtube.com/shorts/dQw4w9WgXcQ rather than the familiaryoutube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ. Plenty of transcript tools only recognise the second and throw an error on the first, which is why "Shorts transcript" is a search people have to make at all.
Every shape of YouTube link is accepted here:
youtube.com/shorts/ID— Shortsyoutu.be/ID— the share-sheet short linkyoutube.com/watch?v=ID— standard, including with&t=or a playlist attachedyoutube.com/live/ID— live streams and their recordingsyoutube.com/embed/ID— embed URLs- Or just the eleven-character video ID on its own
What to expect from a Short
Shorts are typically under sixty seconds, so transcripts are short — often a paragraph or two. The Paragraphs view is usually all you need; timestamps matter less when the whole thing fits on a screen.
Quality varies more than with long-form video. A creator talking clearly to camera transcribes well. A Short built on music, on-screen text and rapid cuts may have no caption track at all, because there was never any speech for YouTube to recognise. That's a property of the video, not something any tool can work around.
Why bother with a Short's transcript
- Repurposing your own Shorts into captions, posts or descriptions elsewhere.
- Grabbing a quote without transcribing it by hand from a sixty-second clip.
- Accessibility — reading rather than watching, or feeding it to a screen reader.
- Language learning, where seeing fast speech written down is the whole point.
If a Short returns nothing
An honest answer beats a spinner: if we say a video has no captions, it genuinely has none. This tool reads existing caption tracks rather than transcribing audio, so when YouTube never generated one and the creator never uploaded one, there is nothing to fetch. Retrying won't change it — you'd need a speech-to-text tool working from the audio instead.
Common questions
Why do other transcript tools reject Shorts links?
Because a Short's URL is /shorts/VIDEO_ID rather than /watch?v=VIDEO_ID, and a lot of tools only ever learned to read the second shape. The video underneath is an ordinary YouTube video — it's purely a URL-parsing failure, not a limitation.
Do I need to convert the link first?
No. Paste the Shorts link as it comes. A /watch?v= version of the same video works identically if you happen to have one.
Why do so many Shorts have no captions?
Auto-captioning needs intelligible speech. Shorts that are mostly music, text on screen, or fast cuts over a backing track often have nothing to transcribe. Talking-head Shorts almost always work.
The transcript is short and messy — is that a bug?
Usually not. Fast, punchy delivery over background music is the hardest case for speech recognition, and thirty seconds of it gives the model very little to work with. Where a creator uploaded their own captions the result is much cleaner.