How to Download a YouTube Transcript
Which Download Format Should You Pick?
| You want to… | Download this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini | Plain text · original | One continuous block of text with no timestamps getting in the way of the prompt. |
| Keep it in Obsidian, Notion, or a doc | Plain text · original | The file is Markdown, so headings and paragraph breaks survive the paste. Any text editor opens it. |
| Load captions into a video editor | SRT · original | SubRip is what Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, CapCut, and YouTube Studio all accept. |
| Re-upload captions in another language | SRT · translation only | A clean single-language subtitle track, timed to the original video. |
| Study a foreign-language video | SRT · bilingual | Original and translation on alternating lines, so you can read both at once. |
| Quote the video in another language | Plain text · bilingual | Same pairing without the timecodes — useful for notes and citations. |
All six downloads are free and unlimited. The translated and bilingual files need a target language picked in the workspace first; the original-language files are always available.
What People Download Transcripts For
Models handle a pasted file better than a pasted chat message — no truncation, no lost line breaks. Download the plain text and attach it to ChatGPT or Claude.
Drop the SRT into Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, or CapCut to get a caption track you can edit, restyle, and burn in.
Save the transcript beside your notes so the source text is still there weeks later, when the video may have been edited or taken down.
Download the bilingual file to check a machine translation line by line against the original wording.
Researchers and journalists keep the transcript on disk as evidence of what was said, with the timecodes intact in the SRT version.
A downloaded file is greppable. Finding one sentence in a three-hour podcast takes a text search, not scrubbing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you download a transcript from YouTube?
Yes. YouTube itself only lets you open the transcript panel and copy the text by hand — there is no download button. Paste the video URL above and you get the same transcript as a file you can save, in plain text or SRT.
Is downloading YouTube transcripts free?
Yes — free, with no account, no extension, and no daily cap. Every format on this page downloads without payment.
How do I download a YouTube transcript without timestamps?
Choose one of the plain-text downloads: they contain the spoken text only. If you want to read and copy it on screen instead of downloading a file, use the transcript without timestamps page.
How do I export a YouTube transcript to Word or Google Docs?
Download the plain-text file and open it in Word or upload it to Google Drive — both read it as ordinary text. There is no separate .docx export, because a plain-text file pastes more cleanly than a converted one.
What is the difference between the transcript and the SRT file?
Same words, different packaging. The transcript is readable prose meant for a document or an AI prompt. The SRT is a subtitle file: numbered cues with start and end timecodes, which is what video editors and YouTube Studio expect.
Can I download the transcript of a video that has no captions?
If the creator never enabled captions and YouTube produced none, there is nothing to download. In that case the page offers to transcribe the audio instead — that part is a paid feature, because it runs the audio through a speech model. Roughly one YouTube video in eleven falls into this bucket.
Does this work on iPhone and iPad?
Yes. It is a web page, not an extension, so it downloads the file through Safari or Chrome the same way it does on a desktop. See the iPad guide if the download lands somewhere unexpected in Files.
Can I download transcripts in bulk or from a script?
Not from this page — it handles one video at a time. For batch work there is a free transcript API that returns the text for a video ID.
How accurate is the downloaded transcript?
It is YouTube's own caption track, so it inherits YouTube's accuracy. We measured 264 videos and found a median word error rate of 9.9% — but a fifth of automatic tracks carry no sentence punctuation at all, which matters more than the word errors when you feed the file to an AI.