YouTube transcript generator.
Read the video instead of watching it.
Paste any YouTube link and get its caption track back as clean, timestamped text you can search, quote and export. No browser extension, no account, no watermark.
Reading the link
Fetching the official text track.
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Title
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How to get a YouTube transcript
Works with youtube.com and youtu.be links, on desktop and on mobile, without installing anything.
Copy the video link
Use Share on the video, or copy the address straight from the browser bar. A bare video id works too.
Paste and fetch
PodText reads the caption track the video already carries, including the auto-generated one, and keeps its timings.
Search, copy, export
Jump between keyword hits, copy the exact wording of a quote, or download the whole thing as Markdown or plain text.
The captions YouTube already has, minus the sidebar.
No extension to install
Transcript extensions read the page you are on and need permissions to do it. PodText runs server side, so nothing is added to your browser and nothing watches your tabs.
Timestamps that survive the export
Every paragraph keeps the second it starts at, so a quote you paste into notes still points back at the moment in the video.
Pick the caption language
When a video carries several caption tracks, switch language after the first fetch and the transcript is rebuilt in that language.
Questions
Which YouTube videos work?
Any public video that has captions, including auto-generated ones. Private, unlisted and members-only videos cannot be read, because the caption track is not published.
What if the video has no captions?
Then there is no text to fetch. PodText never runs the audio through a speech model, so a video with captions switched off returns nothing rather than a guessed transcript.
Are auto-generated captions accurate?
They are as accurate as YouTube made them. Auto captions usually carry no punctuation and can misread names, so check any line you plan to quote against the video.
Can I get the transcript in another language?
Yes, when the creator published more than one caption track. A language selector appears above the transcript after the first fetch.
Is there a length limit?
No. Multi-hour videos work, and long transcripts stay searchable because the keyword jump navigation moves between hits instead of reloading the page.
A link just failed. Why?
YouTube occasionally asks our servers to pass a bot check and returns an empty response. It is not specific to the video, so trying the same link again a few seconds later usually works.