youtubegptYouTube transcript generator
Paste any YouTube link and get the full text in a few seconds — as readable paragraphs, with clickable timestamps, or as a subtitle file. No account, no limits, no watermark.
What you get
Most transcript tools hand you the raw caption stream — hundreds of three-word fragments broken at arbitrary points, because that is how subtitles are timed for display, not for reading. That is fine for a subtitle renderer and useless for anything else. This tool reassembles those fragments before showing them to you.
Readable
Caption fragments merged into paragraphs of roughly 700–1,200 characters, split at sentence ends where the captions have punctuation and at natural speech pauses where they do not. Auto-generated captions almost never contain a single full stop, which is why splitting on punctuation alone fails on them — a music video we tested collapsed into one unbroken 2,089-character block. The pause-aware fallback fixes that.
Timestamps
Every line keeps its original timecode, and each timecode is a link back to that exact second of the video. Useful when you are pulling a quote and need to check it in context, or building show notes. See working with timestamps.
Plain text
One continuous block, no timecodes, no line breaks — the version you want when pasting into a document or a word counter.
For AI
A markdown copy with the video title, channel, duration and source URL as a header, then the paragraphed body with a timestamp anchor at the start of each paragraph. This is the format to hand to ChatGPT or Claude when you want it to summarise the video or answer questions about it — the header gives the model context it otherwise has to guess at, and the anchors let it cite specific moments back to you.
SRT and VTT
Standard subtitle files with the original timing preserved, for video editors, re-uploads and accessibility work.
How to use it
- Copy the video link. From the address bar, or the Share button under the video. Both work, and so does the bare video ID if that is all you have.
- Paste it above and press Get transcript. Extraction usually takes two to five seconds. Longer videos take longer — the 4.4-hour lecture in our tests came back with 2,935 caption lines.
- Pick a format. Switch tabs freely; the video is only fetched once.
- Copy or download. Copy puts the current view on your clipboard. Download saves it as a file named after the video.
The page also accepts a video ID in the URL, so youtubegpt.ai/?v=VIDEO_ID loads that transcript directly — handy for bookmarks and for sharing a specific transcript with someone.
When it will not work
Being straight about the limits, because most tools in this category are not:
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| Video has no captions at all | Nothing to extract. This tool reads captions that already exist; it does not run speech recognition of its own. |
| Age-restricted or private video | YouTube requires a signed-in session to read it, so the captions are unreachable. |
| Members-only video | Same as above. |
| Captions exist but only auto-generated | Works fine. The transcript is marked auto-generated so you know the text may contain recognition errors. |
| Live stream still running | Captions are not final; wait until the stream ends. |
Auto-generated captions are not proofread
YouTube's speech recognition mishears names, technical terms and anything spoken over music. If you are quoting someone, click the timestamp and listen to that moment before you publish the quote. The transcript tells you which kind of track it used.
Why not just use YouTube's own transcript panel?
You can, and for a quick read it is the fastest route: open the description, click Show transcript, and the panel appears beside the video. It is genuinely useful and it is free.
Where it runs out of road is everything after reading. The panel gives you a scrolling list of timed fragments inside a fixed-height box. Selecting all of it by dragging is awkward, the timecodes come along whether you want them or not, and what lands on your clipboard is the fragment structure rather than readable prose. There is no export button, no plain-text option and no subtitle file, and on a phone the panel is harder still to select from. If you want the text somewhere else — a document, a notes app, a language model — you end up cleaning it up by hand.
That gap is the whole reason tools like this one exist. Copying from the YouTube panel covers the manual route in detail, including the parts that trip people up.
Frequently asked
Is it free?
Yes, and there is no account to create. Paste a link and use the result.
Is there a length limit?
No fixed cap. The longest video in our own testing was a 266-minute programming course, which produced 2,935 caption lines and 50,862 words with no truncation.
Can I get the transcript in another language?
If the video has a caption track in that language, yes — the extractor lists every available track. Many popular videos carry a dozen or more; one lecture we tested had 31. See translated subtitles.
Do you store the transcripts?
No. Each request is fetched, formatted and returned. Nothing about the video or the text is kept after the response is sent.
Is there an API?
Yes — the same endpoint this page calls is documented on the API page, including every format parameter.
I can see subtitles in the video — why can't they be extracted?
Because there are two different things that look identical while you watch. A caption track is text data attached to the video, which the player renders on top and you can switch off with the CC button. Burned-in subtitles are part of the picture itself — the creator added them in their editor before uploading, so they are pixels, not text. This is very common on Chinese-language channels, and bilingual subtitles shown two lines at a time are almost always burned in. To tell which you have, open the video and look at the CC button: if it is greyed out or missing, there is no caption track, and no tool can extract that text without running OCR on every frame.
Can I use the text anywhere I like?
The transcript is the video creator's words. Quoting, summarising and studying from it is ordinary use; republishing a whole transcript as if it were your own content is not, and may infringe the creator's rights. Credit the source and link back to the video.
More guides
Independent tool. youtubegpt.ai is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by YouTube or Google. It works with publicly available caption data from YouTube and does not host, mirror or re-upload any video. Transcript text belongs to the original video creators. "YouTube" is a trademark of Google LLC.