Free YouTube transcript generator

What you can do with a YouTube transcript

A transcript is the fastest way to work with a video without watching it again. Search it for the quote you remember, pull the steps out of a tutorial, cite an interview, translate a lecture, or feed it to a writing tool. For creators it is the raw material for everything else: the blog post, the newsletter, the thread, the clip list.

This tool reads the caption track YouTube already has for the video — the creator's own captions when they exist, the auto-generated ones otherwise — and turns it into text you can actually read: sentences instead of three-word fragments, paragraphs instead of one long line, and timestamps only if you ask for them.

Tips for better transcripts

• Creator captions beat auto-captions. If the video has uploaded subtitles, those are used first; auto-generated captions are the fallback and can misspell names and jargon.
• Timestamps help you find clips. Turn them on when you are scanning for moments to cut; turn them off when you want prose to quote.
• No captions, no transcript. A video with captions disabled cannot be transcribed here. Splicora's paid tools transcribe the audio itself with Whisper, which works on any video.
• Long videos work. Multi-hour recordings return fine; they just take a moment longer.

From transcript to content

Inside Splicora the transcript is the first step of a project: the AI clip generator reads it to find the best moments, the subtitle generator times every word for animated captions, and the Write stage turns it into a blog post, a newsletter and social posts in your brand voice. Paste the same link there and the whole pipeline runs.

Transcript formats, and which to use

• Plain paragraphs — for quoting, summarising, translating or pasting into a document.
• With timestamps — for finding the moment to clip, referencing a point in a video, or building chapters.
• As a .txt download — for archiving, feeding a writing tool, or sharing with an editor.

For subtitles you can upload — SRT or VTT with exact timing — you need the video itself, which the paid subtitle generator handles with word-level timing.