YouTube Transcript Extractor
A YouTube transcript extractor does one thing well: it takes a video link and gives you back every spoken word as text you can read, search, copy, and download. No watching at 2x speed, no pausing to type quotes, no browser extensions to install.
This one is free, works entirely in your browser, and adds two things most extractors don't: one-click TXT and SRT downloads, and an optional AI summary that condenses the whole video into a TL;DR, key points, and chapters.
Free, no sign-up — paste a YouTube link and get the script in seconds.
Open the extractorHow to extract a transcript from any YouTube video
Open the video on YouTube and copy its URL — from the address bar or the Share button. Paste it into the input box at the top of this page and click Extract Script. Within a few seconds the full transcript appears.
From there you can read it as clean plain text, switch to the timestamped view to see exactly when each line was spoken, copy everything to your clipboard, or download it as a file. The extractor works with watch-page URLs, youtu.be short links, Shorts, embeds, and live stream replays.
Manual subtitles and auto-captions both work
The extractor reads whatever caption track YouTube already has for the video. That includes subtitles the creator uploaded and YouTube's auto-generated captions, in English and every other language available for that video. When several tracks exist, English is preferred automatically.
Auto-captions come from YouTube's speech recognition, so expect the occasional misheard name or number — always double-check quotes before publishing them.
More than copy-paste: downloads and AI summaries
Copying text out of YouTube's built-in transcript panel is fiddly, especially on a phone. The extractor gives you three cleaner outputs: copy to clipboard, a plain TXT download, and a properly formatted SRT subtitle file you can drop into video editors, media players, or transcription tools.
When the video is long, the AI summary tab saves the reading too: it produces a short TL;DR, five key points, and a chapter breakdown of the main topics — accurate to the transcript, without inventing facts.
When extraction fails: videos without captions
A transcript only exists if the video has captions. If the creator disabled them and YouTube never auto-generated any, there is simply no text to extract — the tool tells you this plainly instead of failing silently.
In that case your alternative is a speech-to-text service that transcribes the audio track itself, which takes longer and usually requires downloading the video first.