YouTube video to text (when auto-captions aren't enough)
YouTube's auto-captions exist — until they're disabled, wrong, or you need clean text without timestamps. Upload the file here and get a proper transcript.
Most YouTube videos have captions. But creators know the gaps: auto-captions can't be copied cleanly, some languages aren't covered, and unlisted or draft uploads have nothing at all.
This page handles the other cases. If you can get the video or audio as a file — your own uploads, an offline copy, audio you exported — upload it and Whisper returns punctuated text in 90+ languages. mp4, m4a, mp3, wav all work.
One honest limit: this is a file uploader, not a YouTube URL extractor. Downloading other people's videos is against YouTube's terms and not something this tool does.
What it's for
Blog posts, newsletters, and subtitles built from videos you published.
Turn the video version of your podcast into show notes and quotes.
Conference talks, webinars, and screen recordings you saved as files.
Questions, answered
Can I just paste a YouTube link?
No — this transcribes files you upload. YouTube's terms don't allow third-party downloading of other people's content, so we don't build extractors.
What about YouTube's own transcript button?
It works for many videos, but the text comes with timestamps and line breaks, unsupported languages show nothing, and creators can disable captions entirely. A file upload always works.
What file types can I upload?
mp4, m4a, mp3, wav, ogg, webm, flac and other common formats, up to 25 MB.
Can it translate too?
It transcribes in 90+ languages; for translation, copy the text into any translator.