How to Get and Use the Transcript of a YouTube Video

By Thiago · Updated September 25, 2026 · 3 min read

A transcript turns an hour of video into text you can skim in minutes, search, quote and take notes from. Most YouTube videos already have one hidden in their captions. Here is how to get it and what to do with it.

Where YouTube transcripts come from

A transcript is built from a video's captions. On YouTube there are two kinds:

Captions added by the creator. They're written or reviewed by a person and are usually accurate, with proper punctuation and names.
Automatic captions. YouTube generates them with speech recognition for many videos in supported languages. They're good but not perfect: expect missing punctuation, misheard names and technical terms.

If a video has no captions of either kind (the creator turned them off, or the audio is mostly music), there's no transcript to show. Private and age-restricted videos can't be read either.

How to get a transcript in seconds

Copy the video link from your browser's address bar or YouTube's "Share" button. Short links (youtu.be) and Shorts work too.
Paste it into YouTube to Text and click "Get transcript".
The video appears next to the full transcript. Click any line to jump to that moment in the video.
Copy the text, or download it as TXT (plain text) or SRT (subtitle format with timestamps).

You can switch between caption languages the video offers, turn timestamps on or off, and use "Translate to" to get YouTube's automatic translation into another language. Machine translation can contain mistakes, so double-check anything important.

You can also share a link like /youtube-to-text?v=VIDEO_ID, which opens the transcript of that video directly.

Practical ways to use a transcript

Studying and taking notes

Read a lecture at your own speed, highlight key passages and paste them into your notes with timestamps, so you can jump back to the explanation later. For many people, reading is two to three times faster than watching.

Research and quoting

Search the text (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) for the exact moment a topic comes up, instead of scrubbing through the video. When you quote someone, check the wording against the video, especially with automatic captions, and cite the video with the timestamp.

Summaries with AI tools

Paste the transcript into an AI assistant and ask for a summary, the main arguments or a list of action items. Turn timestamps off first for cleaner text. Always verify important claims against the source.

Accessibility

Text helps viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, people watching in a noisy place and non-native speakers who follow better when they can read along.

Content creation (for your own videos)

If you're a creator, the transcript of your own video is raw material for a blog post, a newsletter, social posts or show notes. The SRT file can also be edited and re-uploaded as corrected captions.

Tips for better results

Prefer creator captions when the language menu offers both. They're more accurate than the automatic ones.
Clean up before publishing. Automatic captions have no paragraphs. Add breaks at topic changes and fix names.
SRT for editors, TXT for reading. Video editors and players import SRT with timing intact. TXT is best for notes and AI tools.

Respecting creators

A transcript is the creator's words. Using short quotes with credit, taking personal study notes and making content accessible are generally fine. Republishing someone's entire transcript as your own article is not. When in doubt, link to the original video. ConvertKiwi only reads the captions YouTube itself publishes. It never downloads the video or audio.

Have the video file instead? If it's your own recording with no captions, extract the audio with MP4 to MP3 and use a transcription app. There are tips in how to extract audio from a video.