Get the full text of any public YouTube video in seconds — no sign-up needed for your first 25 videos each month.
youtu.be short links, Shorts, live replays, and embeds all work)..txt, .srt, .vtt, .csv, or .json.YouTube stores captions as 1–5 second fragments. VidWords merges them into readable paragraphs, adds one clickable timestamp per paragraph (it opens the video at that exact moment), and inserts the video's chapter headings where they belong. There's also an in-transcript search, a profanity filter, and word/character counts.
If a video has captions in several languages, the language dropdown lists all of them — both author-uploaded and auto-generated tracks. Pick one and the transcript reloads instantly.
Auto-generated captions (marked auto) are produced by YouTube's speech recognition — accuracy is usually 90%+ for clear English speech and lower for noisy audio or heavy accents. Author-uploaded captions are exact. VidWords prefers manual captions when both exist.
For more than a handful of videos, use bulk extraction (paste a list of URLs, a playlist, a channel @handle, or upload a CSV) or the REST API — up to 50 videos per request.
Yes — 25 transcripts per month free, no account required. Registered plans go up to 10,000/month.
If the author disabled captions and YouTube generated none, there's no transcript to fetch — you'll see a clear error instead of a charge.
The transcript text belongs to the video's creator. Quoting and analysis are generally fine; republishing whole transcripts may require permission.