Free YouTube Transcript Generator (+ Guide)

What is a YouTube transcript generator?

A YouTube transcript generator is a tool that turns a video's captions into text you can read, search and copy.

This one reads the captions YouTube keeps for the video, including the automatic ones. Then it cleans them into paragraphs, each with its start time.

How to get the transcript of a YouTube video

Watch links, youtu.be links, Shorts and live stream replays all work.

What you get with every transcript

The words are only the start. Here's what the tool shows next to them:

Part	What it's for
Chapters	The video's own chapters, as headings in the transcript
Timestamps	When each paragraph starts; press one to play the video from there
The hook	The first sentence, and how long it takes to say
Words and pace	The length in words, and the words spoken a minute
Top %	The video's views against the channel's latest 15 videos

The last one tells you if you're studying a hit or an average video, before you spend an hour on it.

Which format to download

Pick the format that fits where the transcript goes next:

Format	Best for
Text (.txt)	Notes, documents and AI chats
Markdown (.md)	Notion, Obsidian and your AI OS, with the chapters as headings
Subtitles (.srt)	Video editors like Premiere Pro, CapCut and Descript
Web subtitles (.vtt)	Video players on the web

Text and Markdown follow the Timestamps switch. Subtitles always carry their times.

Transcripts in other languages

You get the transcript in the language the video is spoken in.

When a video has captions in more languages, pick one from the Language menu. A dubbed video can carry a lot of them: one I checked on September 26, 2026 had 20.

Videos without captions

Almost every video has automatic captions, which YouTube makes itself.

If a creator turns captions off, there's nothing to read, and the tool tells you so. Older videos often have automatic captions with no punctuation; the Add punctuation ask fixes that in your AI.

Chat with the transcript in ChatGPT or Claude

Your AI can't watch a video, but it can read one.

Pick what you want from the Ask your AI to menu, like a summary, quotes or 5 X posts. Then press your AI, and the transcript goes with the ask.

It runs in your own ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or Perplexity. So it's free, and it writes in the chat you already use.

Use it with Claude Code and AI agents

Every transcript also gets its own address on this site, as Markdown.

Give that link to Claude Code, or to any AI that reads links, and it reads the video in one step. The tool writes the Claude Code command for you.

To let your AI read any YouTube video on its own, install my free YouTube MCP server.

5 ways to use a YouTube transcript

A transcript turns a 20-minute video into text you can work with. Here's what creators use them for:

• Repurpose it. Turn one video into X posts, a LinkedIn post and a newsletter.
• Quote it exactly. Pull a line with its time for a script, an article or a reply.
• Study the structure. See how a top video opens, where its chapters fall and how fast it's spoken.
• Subtitle your own video. Download the .srt and add it in your editor.
• Find a moment. Search for the line you remember instead of scrubbing through the video.

The first is the biggest win: one video a week becomes a week of posts.