Paste a YouTube link and get a clean, readable transcript with timestamps. Copy it to your clipboard or download it as TXT or SRT — free and unlimited.
This one needs real processing — transcription, or a video render — so it runs in the app rather than in your browser tab. Free tier: unlimited, no login.
Unlimited, no login
How It Works
Any public video link — youtube.com/watch, youtu.be, or a Shorts URL.
The video's existing caption track is fetched and cleaned up into readable paragraphs with timestamps.
Take it as plain text for reading and repurposing, or as an SRT file with timecodes intact.
Nearly every YouTube video already has a caption track — either uploaded by the creator or generated automatically by YouTube. A transcript generator fetches that track and turns it into something you can actually use: continuous readable text instead of a caption file split into two-second fragments.
Because the captions already exist, this costs nothing to produce and involves no speech recognition. That is why this tool is unlimited and free while the audio-transcription tools on this site are metered — one is reading a file that exists, the other is running a speech model over your audio.
Transcripts are useful well beyond reading. They are how you search a two-hour podcast for the moment someone said the thing you remember, how you pull quotes for a blog post or newsletter, and how a clipping tool decides which thirty seconds of an hour are worth cutting.
Why Use This Tool
Every line keeps its timecode, so you can jump straight back to the moment in the video.
Plain text for reading and repurposing, SRT for subtitle work.
No daily cap and no login, because reading an existing caption track costs nothing to run.
If the video carries captions in a language, the transcript comes back in that language.
Caption fragments are stitched into readable sentences and paragraphs rather than dumped as two-word lines.
Works with anything you can watch without logging in. Private and unlisted videos are not accessible.
Yes, and unlimited. It reads the caption track YouTube already publishes, so there is no per-minute cost to pass on.
Yes. Every line keeps its start time, and the SRT export preserves full timecodes.
Yes, as long as the Short has a caption track. Very short videos sometimes have none, in which case there is nothing to fetch.
Either the creator disabled captions, or YouTube's automatic captions have not been generated — common on very new uploads, music-only videos, or languages its auto-captioning does not cover.
No. The tool can only reach videos that are publicly viewable. For your own footage, use the video-to-text converter and upload the file directly.
It is exactly as accurate as the captions on the video. Creator-uploaded captions are usually near-perfect; YouTube's automatic ones are good on clear speech and weaker on accents, crosstalk and technical terms.
A transcript tells you everything that was said. It does not tell you which part of it would stop a thumb. ShortsHero reads the same transcript, scores every moment for how well it opens and lands, and cuts the strongest ones into finished vertical clips.
Turn a video into clipsFree to start · No credit card required
Keep Going
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