How to Get a YouTube Transcript
Two reliable routes: YouTube's built-in transcript panel for any public video, and uploading the file for a much better transcript of your own.
The Scriptorium team ·
YouTube generates captions for most public videos and will show them to you as a transcript, free, in about ten seconds. If you need something better than that — speaker labels, corrections, subtitle files — you upload the video file to a transcription tool instead. Here is both.
Method 1: YouTube's transcript panel
This works on any public video that has captions, whether or not it is yours, and costs nothing.
- Open the video in a desktop browser. This does not work in the mobile apps.
- Click …more under the video title to expand the description.
- Scroll to the bottom of the expanded description.
- Click Show transcript.
The transcript opens in a panel to the right of the video, with a timestamp on each line. Clicking a line jumps the video to that moment.
Removing the timestamps
Use the three-dot menu at the top of the transcript panel and choose Toggle timestamps. That gives you clean prose you can select and copy straight into a document.
When there is no Show transcript button
Three reasons, and only one has a workaround:
- The uploader disabled captions. Nothing you can do from YouTube's side.
- The video has not been auto-captioned yet. Very new uploads, and some languages, are not covered. Check again later.
- You are on a phone. Open it on a desktop browser instead.
Method 2: upload the file
For your own videos, this is worth the extra two minutes. Download the video from YouTube Studio (Content, then the three-dot menu next to the video, then Download), and upload the file to video to text.
What you get that YouTube's panel does not give you:
- Speaker labels. YouTube's captions are one undifferentiated stream regardless of how many people are talking.
- Better accuracy, particularly on names and technical terms.
- Line-by-line editing, so you can fix errors rather than working around them.
- Real subtitle files — SRT and WebVTT you can upload back to YouTube to replace the automatic captions.
- Other export formats — Markdown, JSON with word timings, CSV.
You cannot paste a YouTube link into Scriptorium. It transcribes files you upload. That is a genuine limitation and it is better stated here than discovered after you have tried.
Which one should you use
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| Skimming someone else's video | YouTube's transcript panel |
| Quoting someone else's video | YouTube's panel, then verify against the audio |
| Captions for your own video | Upload the file, export SRT or WebVTT |
| Show notes or an article from your video | Upload the file, export Markdown |
| An interview with several people | Upload the file, for the speaker labels |
A note on other people's videos
Reading the transcript YouTube provides is a feature YouTube provides, and quoting from a video for commentary, criticism, news or research is ordinary practice. Downloading someone else's video is restricted by YouTube's terms of service, and republishing a full transcript of someone's work as your own is a copyright problem regardless of how you obtained it.