How to Transcribe a YouTube Video for Free

Why transcribe a YouTube video?

A transcript turns a video you have to watch into text you can skim, search, quote, and repurpose. Creators use it for show notes and blog posts, students use it for notes, and marketers use it to squeeze SEO value out of video they already made. It's also the fastest route to captions for accessibility.

Step 1: Copy the video link

Open the video on YouTube, click Share, and copy the URL. Regular videos, Shorts, and most public podcast uploads all work. A link looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=… or https://youtu.be/….

Step 2: Paste it into Scriptery

Paste the link into the YouTube transcript generator and click Get transcript. There's nothing to install and no account required — a free daily quota covers most one-off transcriptions.

Behind the scenes it grabs the video's existing captions when they're available (fast and exact), and falls back to transcribing the audio with speech recognition when they aren't.

Step 3: Copy, download, or export subtitles

When the transcript is ready you can copy the plain text, download it as TXT for notes, or export SRT / VTT to use as a subtitle track in almost any video editor. If you already have a subtitle file in one format, the free SRT/VTT converters will switch between them.

Tips for the best results

• Long videos take a little longer to process than a short clip — that's normal.
• Music-only or speechless sections produce little or no text, which is expected rather than a bug.
• Want just the words without timestamps? Run the transcript through the remove-timestamps tool.

Frequently asked

Is it really free? Yes — a daily quota with no sign-up. Failed transcriptions never use up your quota.

Which languages work? Speech recognition auto-detects the language and supports dozens of them, so non-English videos transcribe fine.

Can I transcribe a private video? Not from a link — download it first, then upload the file on the video-to-text page.