Video → text

Extract text from a YouTube video

To extract text from a YouTube video, paste a link below. The spoken words come back as clean, readable text you can copy, search, translate and export. No video download, no account, no daily limit.

Works on any video with captions · or add the Chrome extension for one-click transcripts on every video.

What you can — and can’t — extract

“Extracting text” from a video means pulling out the words that are spoken in it and laying them down as readable text. On YouTube, those words already exist as a caption track, so extracting them is a matter of reading that track and reformatting it — not transcribing audio from scratch. That’s why it’s instant and free.

Worth being clear up front: this is the spoken text, from the captions. It isn’t the text printed on screen in the video (a slide, a sign, a graphic) — that’s a picture, and pulling it out needs a different, image-based tool. For the spoken words, the caption track is the source, and that’s what this does. The YouTube to text overview covers the bigger picture.

Extract it in one step

No install and no account. Copy the video URL, paste it into the box above, and the words are read and laid out in seconds — one clean block instead of lines flashing by.

1. Copy the link from the address bar or Share button.
2. Paste it into the tool above.
3. Read, copy or export the text.

If you do this often, the Chrome extension extracts the same text right beside the player — one click on any video. For a step-by-step that applies to any video, see how to get the transcript of a YouTube video.

The spoken words, lifted out and laid flat — ready to read and reuse.

How clean the extracted text is

It depends on the caption track behind it. Creator captions — written by the uploader — are punctuated and read well straight away. Auto-generated captions — YouTube’s speech recognition — are fine for clear speech but come without punctuation and stumble on names and jargon. When a video offers both, the creator track is the cleaner source. With an auto track, export the text, add a few full stops and fix any names, and it’s ready to publish.

Copy it, or save it as a file

Once the text is on screen, take it with you. Copy the whole block to the clipboard, or export it:

• TXT — plain text for notes or pasting anywhere.
• Markdown — for docs and note apps like Notion or Obsidian.
• SRT and VTT — if you’d rather have a timed caption file.

Each format keeps or drops the timecodes — a clean read, or working captions. To save a file specifically, downloading the transcript walks through the formats.

Extract it in another language

The text comes out in the video’s own language by default. Want a different one? Pick it from the translate menu and the whole thing switches in a click, then copy or export the result. It runs on the captions, so translating stays free — read and reuse a foreign-language video in the language you actually work in.

Where it stops

Two honest limits. First, a video with no caption track has no text to extract — check the gear → Subtitles/CC; if it’s empty, nothing was captioned, and no tool can extract words that were never written down. Second, this isn’t fresh speech recognition, so it won’t invent a transcript for an uncaptioned video or read words printed in the picture. We’d rather say that plainly than promise something it doesn’t do. What it does, it does instantly and for free: turn an existing caption track into clean, usable text you can take anywhere.

What people do with the text

Once it’s text, it goes wherever you work. Read a long video instead of watching it. Search it for the one line you need and quote it with its timestamp. Paste it into an AI assistant for a summary or the key points — it has the exact words. Drop it into notes as Markdown. Creators pull the text from their uploads and reshape it into blog posts, show notes or social captions. Students turn a recorded lecture into notes they can revise from; researchers pull a quote with its exact wording instead of paraphrasing from memory, then cite the timestamp it came from. The job here is to get the words out cleanly; what you build from them is up to you.

Frequently asked questions

How do I extract text from a YouTube video?

Paste the video link into the tool above. The spoken words are read from the captions and laid out as clean text you can copy, translate or export — free, with no sign-in.

Does this extract text from the audio or the captions?

From the captions YouTube already provides. It’s not speech recognition — it reads the existing caption track, which is why it’s instant and free. A video with no captions has no text to extract.

Can it pull text that appears on screen in the video?

No. It extracts the spoken words from the caption track, not text shown in the picture. For on-screen text you’d need a different, image-based tool.

Is it really free?

Yes — extracting, reading, copying and exporting the text is free, with no account and no daily limit.