About Free YouTube Transcribe

Free YouTube Transcribe does one thing: paste a YouTube link, get the full transcript. No account, no quota, no watermark, no premium tier holding the useful parts hostage.

Why we built it

We kept running into the same wall: every "free" transcript site was a funnel. Ten videos a month, then a paywall. Copy allowed, downloads locked. A transcript held behind a sign-up form. Yet the underlying data, the captions YouTube publishes for nearly every public video, is already free. Charging rent on it felt wrong, so we built the tool we wanted to use instead.

What it does

• Turns any public YouTube video, including Shorts, into a readable, searchable transcript in seconds
• Jumps the built-in player to any line with clickable timestamps, and highlights the current line as the video plays
• Switches between every caption language a video has, both uploaded and auto-generated
• Tidies the punctuation of auto-generated captions on request
• Copies plain text, timestamped text, or an AI-ready summary prompt, and downloads TXT, SRT, and VTT files

Our principles

Free means free. Transcripts come from caption data YouTube already publishes, which costs almost nothing to serve. So the whole tool is free, without limits, and we intend to keep it that way.

Respect the visitor. No sign-up walls, no dark patterns, no nagging pop-ups. Your recent transcripts and preferences stay in your own browser, not on our servers.

Respect the creators. Transcripts are generated from captions that creators and YouTube make public. The content belongs to its creators; this tool exists for reference, study, accessibility, and research.

Get in touch

Found a bug, missing a feature, or just want to say the tool saved you an afternoon? Visit the contact page. We read everything.