About YouTube Transcript AI

A free YouTube transcript generator built by people who got tired of pausing, rewinding, and typing.

youtube-transcript.ai is a free YouTube transcript generator. It turns any public YouTube video into clean, readable text in a few seconds: paste a link, get the full transcript, then copy it, download it as TXT or SRT, translate it, or ask an AI questions about it. No account, no credit card, no daily cap on the basics.

Everything on this site is built around one job — getting the text out of a YouTube video and into something you can use. That covers extracting a transcript, converting a YouTube video to text, downloading subtitles as a file, translating captions into another language, summarising a long video, and handing the transcript to an AI. We do not host video, we do not run a video editor, and we do not do anything unrelated to transcripts.

Every rating above comes from reviews people actually left on this site, stored in our own database and rendered from it. We mention this because inflated review counts are common in this category — ours is a number you can check against the review list on the site.

What you can do here

Each job below has its own page, because each one is a different question people arrive with:

• Get a YouTube transcript — the main tool. Paste any YouTube URL and read the full transcript on the page.
• YouTube transcript generator — the same thing framed as a generator, with the steps spelled out for first-time users.
• Convert a YouTube video to text — for when you want the words as a document rather than as captions.
• Download a YouTube transcript — save it as a TXT or SRT file instead of copying from the screen.
• Transcript without timestamps — clean prose with the timecodes stripped out, ready to paste into a document or an AI prompt.
• YouTube subtitle downloader — subtitle files specifically, including bilingual SRT with two languages per caption.
• Transcript AI — what becomes possible once a video is text: summaries, questions, notes, translation.
• Summarise a YouTube video — skip the transcript and go straight to the key points.
• Ask a YouTube video questions — chat with the content instead of scrubbing the timeline.
• Podcast transcripts — the same workflow for long-form interviews and podcast episodes.
• The transcript workspace — video, transcript, translation, and AI side by side in one screen.
• MCP server — a free, keyless connector so Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor can read YouTube transcripts on their own.
• When a transcript will not load — what causes an empty result and what to do about it.
• On iPad and iPhone — the same tool without an app, plus where the file lands after you download it.

Why we built it

YouTube holds an enormous library of lectures, tutorials, interviews, and conference talks — and almost all of it is locked inside audio. If you wanted to quote a lecture, study from a tutorial, or turn a talk into an article, you were stuck scrubbing the timeline and typing by hand.

YouTube does show a transcript panel, but it has no download, no clean copy, no translation, and no way to hand the text to an AI. The tools that filled that gap were either cluttered with ads, capped after a few videos, or asked you to install an extension before you could see whether they worked at all.

So we built the thing we wanted: paste a URL, read the transcript on the page, take it wherever you need it.

What makes ours different

It comes back with an answer more often

Fetching a caption track sounds simple until you do it at scale — the same video can hand back a full transcript on one request and nothing at all on the next. Most of our engineering time goes into the retrieval path rather than the interface, with several layers of fallback sitting behind every request. You never see any of that, and that is rather the point: you rarely get an empty result.

Videos with no captions still work

When a video genuinely has no caption track — nothing uploaded by the creator and nothing auto-generated — we can transcribe the audio with AI instead. Most free tools simply fail here and tell you the video is unsupported.

Word-level timing, not just lines

Our transcripts carry timing at the word level, which is what makes the karaoke-style highlighting follow along with playback and lets you click any word to jump to that exact moment in the video.

Six ways to take the text with you

Plain text and SRT, each available in the original language, translated, or bilingual with both languages stacked line by line. The bilingual SRT in particular is something language learners and subtitlers ask for and rarely find.

Your AI agent can call it directly

We publish an MCP server — a free, keyless endpoint listed in the official Model Context Protocol registry. Add one URL to Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor and your assistant can read YouTube transcripts on its own, mid-conversation, without you copying anything. Very few tools in this category offer this.

It speaks your language

The interface ships in 11 languages, not just English, and transcripts translate into over 100.

Who we build for

• Students — turn a two-hour lecture into notes you can search, quote, and revise from.
• Content creators — repurpose one video into a blog post, a newsletter, and a thread.
• Researchers and journalists — pull exact, timestamped quotes out of interviews and talks.
• Language learners — read along with bilingual subtitles instead of guessing.
• Accessibility needs — a text alternative for anyone who is deaf or hard of hearing, or who simply reads faster than they listen.
• Developers and AI agents — a free, keyless MCP server your assistant can call directly.

How it actually works

When you paste a YouTube URL, we retrieve the caption track that YouTube already publishes for that video — either uploaded by the creator or auto-generated by YouTube — then clean it, restore sentence structure, and format it as readable text with timestamps. We are not re-processing the audio in the normal case, which is why results arrive in seconds rather than minutes.

AI transcription only kicks in for videos that have no caption track at all. Translation and summarization run on top of the transcript after it is retrieved.

What we stand for

Free where it counts

Getting a transcript from a video that has captions is free, unlimited, and requires no account. We charge only for AI transcription of videos that have no captions, because that one genuinely costs us GPU time to run.

Honest numbers

The rating on this site is computed from real reviews in our database. We would rather show a 4.7 that is real than a 4.9 that is not.

Respect for creators

We work only with captions YouTube already serves publicly. We do not host, mirror, or redistribute video.

Privacy by default

Reading a transcript requires no login, so there is no profile and no watch history attached to you. We do not sell data. Details are in our Privacy Policy.

The team behind it

We are a small independent team. We also build SubKun, a browser extension that puts real-time bilingual subtitles and AI summaries directly on the YouTube player while you watch. Same people, same idea approached from the other direction: this site is for when you want the text, SubKun is for when you want to stay in the video.

Not affiliated with YouTube or Google. youtube-transcript.ai is an independent service. YouTube and all related marks are trademarks of Google LLC, used here only to describe what the tool does.

Get in touch

Questions, bug reports, feature requests, or press enquiries — write to hello@youtube-transcript.ai or use the contact page. A person reads every message.

Try it

Free to start, and no sign-up for the basics.

Get a transcript now