Free YouTube transcript, with or without captions

Yes — this transcribes the audio directly, so it doesn't depend on whether a caption track exists. That's the one thing browser extensions and most free transcript sites can't do: they read YouTube's existing captions, so when the creator disables them there's nothing for those tools to read.

Often, yes — under the video, via the three-dot menu, and that's the faster route when it's there and you only need to read it. It falls short when the creator disabled captions, when the language isn't one YouTube auto-captions, when you want a downloadable SRT rather than text you have to clean up by hand, or when the auto-captions are visibly wrong.

Sometimes, and it's worth comparing. YouTube's auto-captions and this run on different systems — ours is Whisper large-v3 — so on accented speech, technical vocabulary or music under the voice they often disagree. Neither is authoritative. Having two independent passes to compare is more useful than either side claiming an accuracy percentage.

Neither. Paste the link and that's it — nothing is downloaded to your device, and there's no extension, no add-on and no permissions to grant.

Not in one pass — 20 minutes is the per-video limit, which rules out most full podcasts and long-form talks. The workaround is to convert the video to audio, split it at natural pauses, and transcribe each section. If the video does have captions, YouTube's own transcript panel has no length limit and is the better route for something that long.

Yes — SRT and VTT both download free, alongside plain text. YouTube's own transcript panel has no download button for viewers, which is usually why people end up here.

Yes — standard watch links, youtu.be short links, and /shorts URLs are all accepted. Private, deleted, and region-blocked videos aren't accessible.

Yes — choose English output and it translates as it transcribes, in one pass. English is the only translation target available.

Free, with no account, no email and no credits. Exports aren't paywalled. The limits are 20 minutes per video and 2 per hour, and they exist to keep the queue moving — there's no paid tier to upgrade to.

Nothing is uploaded from your device — you send a link, and the audio is fetched server-side. That downloaded audio is deleted as soon as the transcript is finished, whether the job succeeded or failed. The transcript is available for 1 hour, then removed. Nothing is stored on disk afterwards. There are no accounts, so nothing is linked to you.

That depends on the video and what you're doing with it. Transcribing someone else's video for personal reference, accessibility, study or quotation is generally reasonable; republishing the transcript as your own content is not. You're responsible for how you use it.