How to download or copy a YouTube transcript

Method 1: copy from YouTube’s own transcript panel (desktop)

Open the video on a computer. Under the video, expand the description with ...more and click Show transcript. A panel opens on the right with every line and its timestamp. Click the three-dot menu at the top of the panel to Toggle timestamps off if you want clean text. Then click at the first line, shift-click at the last, and copy. This works only when the video has captions and the creator has not disabled the panel. There is no download button; you paste the copied text into a document yourself, and long videos take some scrolling to select.

Method 2: download the transcript as a file (any device)

Paste the video URL into the box at the top of this page. The transcript is fetched from the video’s caption track, duplicate caption fragments are removed, and the text is grouped into readable paragraphs. Copy it, or download it as TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT, CSV or JSON. Your first 30 transcripts are free and there is no account to create. Because the page is a plain web page, this is also the route that works on a phone.

On a phone or iPhone

The YouTube mobile app shows a Transcript section under some videos (tap the description, scroll to Transcript), but it is missing on many videos, it cannot be copied as one block, and it has no export. The reliable path on iPhone or Android is to tap Share on the video, choose Copy link, open this page in Safari or Chrome, paste the link, and copy or download the result. Downloads land in your Files or Downloads app.

When the transcript panel is missing

Three reasons cover almost every case: the video has no captions at all, the creator turned off automatic captions, or the video is a live stream that has not finished processing. In the first two cases no tool can produce a caption-based transcript and you need speech-to-text on the audio instead. In the third, try again after the stream ends. If a video does have captions in another language, the extractor above falls back to that track and tells you which language it used.

Copying transcripts from many videos

If you are about to repeat this for a playlist or a whole channel, stop copying one at a time. Paste the playlist or channel URL instead and every available transcript comes back in one job as separate files or one combined document. See the playlist downloader and the channel downloader.

Quick steps

1. Copy the video's URL from the address bar or the Share button.
2. Paste it into the box above and press the button. The transcript appears in seconds.
3. Switch timestamps on or off, then copy the text or choose TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT, CSV or JSON to download.