Convert YouTube to text

Turn a video into text you can read, search, quote and paste. The conversion uses YouTube's caption track, so it takes seconds and matches the words on screen.

Any YouTube link. The text opens beside the player, not in a new tab.

Why text beats video for most jobs

Reading runs roughly three times faster than listening at normal speed, and words on a page are searchable. Video is neither.

Convert YouTube video to text and a forty-minute conference talk becomes about six thousand words. As video you sit through it once and hope you remember where the good part was. In writing you skim the headings, search for the term you care about, copy two paragraphs, and close the tab. The conversion takes seconds, and the difference in your afternoon is real.

What the converted text looks like

Not a wall. Caption data arrives from YouTube in fragments of a few words each, which nobody can read in bulk, so the panel regroups it into blocks of 15 to 25 seconds that end on sentence boundaries. Each block carries a timestamp that seeks the player when clicked.

When you copy or download, timestamps are optional. Off for a document or a prompt, on when you need to point at a moment.

One honest limit: this converts videos that already have captions. It does not run speech recognition on the audio, so a silent-captioned music video or a noisy recording with no caption track converts to nothing.

After the conversion

Where the text usually goes next

Notes

Notion, Obsidian, Docs

Plain .txt pastes without carrying formatting garbage, so a lecture becomes a note in one paste instead of a cleanup session.

Prompts

ChatGPT and Claude

Neither can open a YouTube link and read its captions. Handing them the transcript is the workaround, and it is the reason half the people on this page are here.

Publishing

Blog posts and threads

One upload becomes a newsletter and three quote tiles. The transcript is the raw material, the summary is the outline.

Languages

The picker lists whatever caption tracks the video carries: English, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese and a hundred more. Many videos have several, because creators upload subtitle files for their bigger audiences, and switching between them takes one click and no reload.

What it does not do is translate. If the only track is Korean, you get Korean captions, then translate them wherever you normally would. Pretending otherwise would mean feeding you a machine translation of a machine transcription, and the errors multiply fast.

FAQ

YouTube to text FAQ

How do I convert a YouTube video into text?

Paste the link above, install the extension, then open the video and click the icon. Every caption line appears in the side panel, ready to search, copy or save as .txt. YouTube's own Show transcript panel is the no-install alternative.

Is YouTube to text free?

Yes, with daily caps of 80 conversions, 150 tag lookups and 20 AI summaries, reset at midnight UTC. No account, no trial, no card.

Can I convert YouTube to text on my phone?

Not with this. Chrome on Android and iOS does not support extensions. On mobile, use the YouTube app's transcript view or a website that takes a pasted URL.

Does the text include timestamps?

Every block has one, and they are clickable in the panel. Whether they end up in your copied text or your .txt file is a toggle you control before exporting.

How accurate is the converted text?

As accurate as the video's captions. Creator-uploaded subtitles are usually clean. Automatic captions handle clear speech well and stumble on names, jargon and heavy accents. Nothing downstream can repair an error already in the caption file.

Can it convert a video that has no captions?

No. There is nothing to read in that case. Converting audio to text requires speech recognition, which is a slower and heavier kind of tool than this one.

Turn the next video into text you can work with

Free, in 100+ caption languages, without an account.

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