Transcription is live again: 60 free minutes a month, Pro is $19/mo. Other tools are coming back. Students: lecture notes still live at VocalScribe.
Turn a YouTube video into text by downloading the video as an MP4 (or its audio as M4A) and uploading that file to Kai The Scribe, then clicking Start Transcription. Pasting a youtube.com link does not work, because the tool needs the media file itself, not the watch page.
YouTube video to text is a two part job: get the file out of YouTube, then transcribe it. YouTube video to text takes about five minutes end to end for a 20 minute video, and the transcript comes back as punctuated plain text you can paste into a blog post, a description, or a script for the next video.
The file has to come from somewhere you have rights to. There are two normal cases.
Someone else's video needs their permission and their file. The tool does not fetch or rip videos from YouTube, and this guide does not cover that.
There are six steps. The labels match what the tool shows.
The upload limit is 4 MB per file, and video fills that in seconds. A 1080p MP4 at a typical 8 Mbps bitrate is about 60 MB per minute of footage. Audio is far smaller: a 60 minute M4A at 128 kbps is about 55 MB, and about four minutes of it fits in 4 MB. The transcriber only listens to the audio, so exporting audio loses nothing. For anything over the limit, paste a direct public link to the file under Media URL; linked files have no 4 MB cap.
Three ways to get audio out of a video are common. Export audio only from your editor. Open the file in VLC and use Convert to save an MP3. Or run ffmpeg with the copy audio option, which extracts the track in seconds without re-encoding.
The output is one block of punctuated plain text with numbers written as digits. YouTube's Show transcript panel gives you timed fragments with no punctuation and no download button, and it only appears after the video is public. The differences that matter are below.
A transcript turns one video into three more assets in an afternoon. Paste the full text under the video on your own site as an article, because that text is what search engines index. Cut the three strongest paragraphs into a newsletter. Pull the best 30 seconds of text and use it as the script for a short. Each of those starts with a transcript that took a minute to make.
No. A youtube.com link points to a web page, not a media file, and the tool returns an error for it. Download the video as MP4 from YouTube Studio, or export its audio as M4A or MP3, then upload that file or paste a direct link to it.
YouTube's Show transcript panel is useful for skimming but it has no punctuation, splits text into short timed fragments, and only exists after the video is public. This tool works on the file before you publish, returns punctuated sentences, and gives you a .txt download.
Put the file at a direct public link and paste it under Media URL. Uploads are capped at 4 MB, which is a few seconds of 1080p video or about four minutes of 128 kbps audio. A YouTube page link will not work; the link has to point at the media file itself.
Not directly. The output is plain text, not an SRT or VTT file with timestamps. You can paste the plain text into YouTube Studio's subtitle editor and let YouTube sync the timing, which works well for clear single-speaker videos.
Every account gets 60 free minutes of transcription a month. Pro is $19 a month if you publish more than an hour of video a month. Minutes count the length of the video.