SiftwrightYouTube transcript generator
Paste a YouTube link and get the full transcript in seconds. Copy it, show timestamps, or download TXT, SRT or VTT. Free, no account.
Try: "Me at the zoo", the first video ever uploaded to YouTube
What people use transcripts for
Summaries and notes
Paste the text into your notes app or an AI assistant to summarise a lecture, podcast or tutorial without watching all of it.
Quotes and research
Search a long video for the exact sentence, then jump to it with the timestamp links.
Subtitles and blog posts
Download SRT or VTT for editing, or turn a talk into an article, show notes or a newsletter.
Transcripts at scale, by API
Building a search index, an LLM pipeline or a research dataset? The same engine runs behind one API call that takes videos, Shorts, playlists and channels, picks the best caption track, can translate, and returns text, segments, SRT or VTT.
curl https://siftwright.com/v1/youtube-transcript \
-H "Authorization: Bearer sw_live_YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"urls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@somechannel"], "maxVideosPerSource": 25, "outputFormats": ["text", "srt"]}'Plans start at $29/month for 10,000 transcripts, and failed videos are free. Prefer pay-as-you-go? The same tool is on the Apify Store at $3 per 1,000 transcripts.
Frequently asked questions
Is this YouTube transcript tool free?
Yes. No account and no watermark. Everyone shares a daily allowance (up to 15 free runs per network per day across our free tools, and a fixed daily total), which keeps it free. Transcripts you've fetched are cached for a day, so opening the same video again is instant.
Which videos work?
Any public YouTube video or Short that has captions, either uploaded by the creator or auto-generated by YouTube. Private, members-only and some age-restricted videos don't have captions we can read, and live streams only get captions after they end.
Can I get the transcript in another language?
Pick a language before you fetch. If the video has captions in that language we use them; otherwise you get the closest available track and the result lists every caption language the video has. The API can also machine-translate into another language.
What formats can I download?
Plain text, text with timestamps, SRT and WebVTT subtitle files. The SRT and VTT files are built from YouTube's caption timings, so they line up with the video.
Can I transcribe a whole playlist or channel?
Not here; this page does one video at a time. The YouTube Transcript API takes playlists, channels and lists of up to 10 sources per call, and only successful transcripts count toward your plan.
Do you transcribe the audio with AI?
No. We fetch the captions YouTube already has for the video. That's why it's fast and accurate when captions exist, and why videos with captions turned off return nothing.
Is it OK to use YouTube transcripts?
Fetching captions to read, search, quote or summarise a video is a common, everyday use. Republishing someone else's content is a different matter: check the creator's rights and YouTube's terms for anything beyond personal use.
Every transcript you need, from one key
Videos, playlists and channels in one call. Plans from $29/month with 10,000 successful results; failed videos never count.