How to transcribe a YouTube video

Before installing anything, check whether YouTube has already done this for you. For most videos it has, and it costs nothing.

Short answer: Open the video, expand the description, and look for Show transcript. If a transcript is there and readable, you are finished. Another tool becomes worth it when the video has no captions, the text is too rough to quote from, or you need speaker labels or a subtitle file.

Getting YouTube's own transcript

1. Open the video on a computer.
2. Expand the description under the video.
3. Choose Show transcript. It opens in a panel beside the video.

The panel shows the text of the captions that exist for that video, so it appears when captions do and not otherwise.

Those captions may have been generated automatically or supplied by the creator, and the panel does not always say which. Either way, check the text against the audio before quoting it. Names, technical terms and punctuation are where automatic captions most often go wrong.

When that is not enough

There are four situations where the built-in transcript runs out.

• The video has no available captions. No captions means no transcript panel. That can be a creator setting, an unsupported language, or processing that has not finished.
• The text is too rough to work from. Read a paragraph and decide. Difficult audio produces captions you would not want to quote.
• You need to know who said what. YouTube's transcript is one undifferentiated block. It never separates speakers.
• You need a subtitle file. Copying text from the panel gives you text, not timed SRT.

The other route

If you need one of those things, the job becomes an ordinary transcription job: get the audio, then transcribe it.

Downloading depends on who owns the video. If it is your own, you probably still have the file, and YouTube Studio can download the video as an MP4. For someone else's video, check what YouTube permits and get the permissions you need first.

With the file in hand:

1. Open AI Transcribe on a Mac or an iPhone.
2. Import the file. Video or audio, up to three hours.
3. You get a transcript with timestamps and speakers separated into turns.
4. Export it as text, Word or an SRT subtitle file, or run the AI tools over it for a summary or the key points.

Worth being straight about this: the app does not take a YouTube link. Several tools on the first page of search results do exactly that, and if pasting a URL is what you want, they are the better fit. Use this route when you have the file and want to review or export the transcript.

Common questions

Can I transcribe a YouTube video without downloading it? Not with an app that works on files. URL-based web tools exist for that. For your own videos, the source file is usually easier to reach than the YouTube copy anyway.

Why does YouTube's transcript read so roughly? Captions are written to be read along with the speech, a line at a time, rather than as a document. Whichever tool you use, punctuation, names and technical terms are worth checking against the audio.

Can I get subtitles rather than plain text? Yes, export the transcript as SRT. That is the standard subtitle file, and here is what one contains.

Does this work for a video in another language? Yes. Transcription covers 32 languages with automatic detection, and you do not have to say which one to expect.