Download a YouTube transcript as a .txt file you keep.
Paste the video link, pick Transcript, and hit Generate. You get the cleaned captions on screen with a Copy button and a Download .txt button, no timestamps, no AI rewrite, no login for the first one.
Transcript
Your generated draft will appear here.
What This Does
You found a YouTube video with something worth keeping in a video you can't easily quote, search, or paste elsewhere. Download YouTube transcript text and the video's own captions become a plain text file that lives on your computer instead of inside a YouTube tab.
It is not a generator. It does not summarize the video, rewrite it, or turn it into a blog post (that's a different tool, linked below, for when that's what you actually want). This one just gets the words out of the video and into a file you own.
Most people who download YouTube transcript files are not trying to read them in a browser. They want to search the text, quote a line from it, paste it into an LLM, or keep it around after the video is gone. That is what the .txt file is for.
How People Do This By Hand
YouTube already has a transcript panel built in. Open the video, click the "..." menu under it (or the three dots next to the description on some layouts), choose "Show transcript," and a scrollable list of timestamped lines opens in a sidebar.
From there you select all the text, copy it, and paste it into Notes, a doc, or wherever you're keeping it. The timestamps come along for the ride and you either leave them in or strip them out by hand, one line at a time, or with a find-and-replace regex if you know how to write one.
Honestly, for a five-minute video where you just need one quote, this is fine. It costs nothing and takes about a minute. Where it gets annoying is on a 90-minute podcast: scrolling that panel, selecting hundreds of timestamped lines, and manually cleaning them up stops being a minute of work and starts being ten.
How the Download Works
To download YouTube transcript text here, paste the link and pick the Transcript format. The tool reads the caption track YouTube already has attached to that video (manually written or auto-generated, whichever is available). It strips the timestamps, collapses repeated lines that auto-captions tend to produce, and joins everything into readable paragraphs.
That's the whole transformation. No AI model rewrites the wording, summarizes it, or adds anything, the transcript step does not call a language model at all, so what you get is the speaker's own words, just cleaned up and formatted as a paragraph instead of a wall of timestamped fragments. From there, Copy grabs it to your clipboard and Download .txt saves it as a file.
The honest limit: the video has to already have captions. Auto-generated captions count and are the most common case, but if a creator has disabled captions entirely, or YouTube hasn't generated any for that video, there's nothing to pull and the download will fail rather than invent text.
A Real Example
To show this working on an actual video instead of describing it in the abstract, here's the opening of But what is a neural network? | Deep learning chapter 1 (3Blue1Brown), run through the tool's Transcript format. You can open the video and check it against the timestamp around 0:04 to verify it yourself.
Downloaded .txt excerpt
This is a 3. It's sloppily written and rendered at an extremely low resolution of 28x28 pixels, but your brain has no trouble recognizing it as a 3. And I want you to take a moment to appreciate how crazy it is that brains can do this so effortlessly.
Note the timestamps are gone and the fragmented caption lines YouTube shows in its own transcript panel are joined into normal sentences. Nothing in that paragraph was reworded, it's the manually written caption track for this video, just reformatted.
YouTube Transcript Download FAQ
What file format do I actually get?
A plain .txt file. It is the cleaned caption text joined into readable paragraphs, no HTML, no markdown, no timestamps. You can open it in Notepad, paste it into a doc, or drop it into another tool.
Can I get an .srt file with timestamps instead?
Not from this tool. It only outputs plain .txt without timestamps, on purpose, because most people who want a downloadable transcript want to read or reuse the words, not sync them to video. If you need timestamped .srt for subtitle editing, YouTube's own "Show transcript" panel keeps the timestamps, or a dedicated subtitle downloader is a better fit.
Is downloading a YouTube transcript free?
Yes for a first use: you can download YouTube transcript text once without an account, and free sign-up credits follow with no card required. It is not free without limit forever, generating a transcript still uses a credit past the demo and free monthly allowance.
Does it work on long videos, like a 2-hour podcast or lecture?
It reads whatever caption track YouTube has for the video, so length by itself is not the limiter, caption availability is. Very long videos take a little longer to fetch and clean, but a 2-hour lecture with captions works the same way as a 5-minute clip.
What if the video doesn't have captions?
Then there is nothing to download. This tool pulls existing captions, including auto-generated ones, it does not transcribe audio itself. If YouTube shows no "cc" option on the video, or the creator disabled captions, the download will fail and say so instead of guessing at the words.
Can I download the transcript from a private or unlisted video?
Unlisted videos with a working link generally work the same as public ones. Private videos, no: the tool has no way to authenticate as you, so it can't reach a video that requires you to be signed in to view.
Do I need to create an account?
No, not for the first one. One free demo runs without any login. Creating a free account gets you 5 more credits and lets you come back to past downloads instead of losing them when you close the tab.
What do people actually do with the downloaded file?
Common ones: paste it into ChatGPT or Claude to summarize or ask questions against a long video, search it for a phrase they half-remember, quote a line accurately in an article or thread, or keep it as a personal archive of a video that might get taken down.
Need More Than a Transcript File?
If you need a transcript to exist in the first place, or you want the video turned into something publishable instead of a raw text file, these do that.