YouTube transcript generator
Paste a video and get its spoken text — plain for reading and rewriting, or timestamped for jumping back to a moment.
What people do with a transcript
- Turn a video into a post. The transcript is the draft; the editing is deciding what to cut.
- Find the quote. Searching text beats scrubbing a timeline when you know something was said but not when.
- Research a competitor. Reading a twenty-minute video takes three minutes.
- Feed a model. Summaries, chapter titles and answer extraction all start from this text.
Plain text or timestamps
Plain text reads like an article and is what you want for rewriting. The timestamped view keeps a marker on every line, which is how you find the exact second something was said — and what chapter markers are built from.
Why some videos return nothing
No caption track, no transcript. That happens when a creator disabled captions, when the video has no speech, or occasionally on very fresh uploads where YouTube has not finished generating them yet. Trying again an hour later often works.
The transcript is what was said — comments are what landed
PostLink analyses the comments alongside the transcript of any video and surfaces what viewers reacted to — then suggests the videos and titles most likely to break out with that audience.
Analyze a video freeQuestions
How do I get the transcript of a YouTube video?
Paste the video URL above. The tool reads the caption track YouTube already has — including the auto-generated one — and returns the text, which you can copy with or without timestamps or download as a .txt file.
Does it work if the creator never uploaded captions?
Usually yes. YouTube generates captions automatically for most spoken-word videos, and that track is what the tool reads. Videos with captions disabled, or music videos without speech, return nothing.
Is the transcript accurate?
Auto-generated captions are strong on clear speech and weaker on names, jargon, accents and crosstalk. They carry no punctuation reliability either, so treat them as raw material for a summary or a blog post rather than a quotable transcript.
Can I get transcripts in other languages?
You get the caption track the video publishes. When a creator uploads several, the tool returns the default one — normally the language spoken in the video.
Is it free?
One transcript without an account and one more after signing up free. Beyond that it runs on a paid plan, because each transcript costs us a fetch. The tools that cost us nothing — tag extraction, subscriber counts, playlist maths — stay unlimited.
Can I use this in my own app?
Yes. The same endpoint is available with an API key on the paid plans, so an agent or script can fetch transcripts the same way this page does.