Free YouTube Transcript Generator
Paste a YouTube link → get the whole video as clean, readable text. Copy it into ChatGPT or Claude to summarize, or keep the timestamps. No signup.
Made for feeding an AI
A 40-minute video is roughly 6,000 words of speech. Pasting those words into a model costs a fraction of what processing the video would, and every model on the market handles plain text well. Hit Copy full transcript and you have a prompt-ready block for a summary, a set of key points, a blog draft, study notes, or a fact you half-remember hearing at minute 23.
Timestamps stay if you want them
The generated text comes with each segment's start time, so you can jump back to the moment something was said. Keep them for research and citation, or take the clean TXT version when you just want prose. JSON keeps every segment as a structured record if you're piping this into your own tooling.
Generator, downloader — what's the difference?
Nothing, mechanically: both read the video's caption track. This page is set up for reading and reusing the text; if what you actually want is a subtitle file for an editor or a player, the transcript downloader leads with SRT and VTT instead.
One video, or the whole channel
This generates one video at a time. If you're building context for an AI agent, a channel's entire back catalogue is the real corpus — every transcript, plus every comment classified into what that audience keeps asking for. That's the Channel X-Ray report, and the shape it takes for agents is the soul pack.
FAQ
How do I generate a transcript from a YouTube video?
Paste the video's URL above. The transcript is generated in a few seconds. Copy it with one click, or export it as SRT, VTT, TXT or JSON. No account needed.
Can I use this to summarize a video with AI?
That's what most people use it for. Copy the generated transcript, paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or any other model, and ask for a summary, key points, timestamps or a rewrite. The transcript is plain text, so it costs very few tokens compared with uploading video.
Does it work on videos without uploaded subtitles?
Yes. YouTube auto-generates captions for most videos, and those are what we read. Videos with captions disabled entirely by the uploader can't be transcribed by any tool.
How accurate is the transcript?
It's YouTube's own caption track, so accuracy matches what viewers see with captions on: very good for clear speech, weaker on heavy accents, crosstalk, and specialist jargon. We don't re-transcribe it, which is also why it's instant and free.
More free tools
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See all of them on the free tools page.