How to Get the Transcript of a YouTube Video (Computer, Phone, and Download)

1. Open the video on youtube.com.
2. Click the description under the video (or "...more") to expand it.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the description. Under Transcript, click Show transcript.

A panel called In this video opens on the right, on the Transcript tab. Each line has a timestamp, the current line follows along as the video plays, and clicking a line jumps the video to that moment. If the video has chapters, the transcript is split under chapter headings.

• Hide timestamps: click the three dots at the top of the panel and choose Toggle timestamps.
• Find a word: type it in Search in video at the top of the panel.
• Change language: click the language name at the bottom of the panel. The list shows every caption track the video has. Tracks marked "auto-generated" are YouTube's speech recognition, not captions the creator wrote.

1. Open the video in the YouTube app.
2. Tap the video title to open the description.
3. Scroll down to Transcript and tap Show transcript.

Tap any line to jump to that part of the video. As on a computer, the app has no copy or download button for the transcript.

YouTube's panel is for reading along, not for saving. To get the text as a file, use a transcript tool. Ours is GetYouTubeTranscript, and it is free to try:

1. Copy the video link from the address bar, or from Share in the app.
2. Paste it on the homepage and click Get Free Transcript.
3. Click Copy for the whole text, or Download for a plain text file. When timestamps are available, you can also download subtitles as SRT or VTT.

The page also shows a short summary and lets you ask the video questions. It works in a phone browser too, which is the easiest way to save a transcript on mobile.

Other options: the Chrome extension puts the transcript beside the player on youtube.com, and export formats explains TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON and the rest. Developers can fetch transcripts in code with the transcript API.

The button only appears when the video has captions. Common reasons it is missing:

• The creator turned captions off or never added any.
• The video was uploaded recently, or is a live stream, and automatic captions are not ready yet.
• The speech is in a language YouTube does not caption automatically.
• It is mostly music or has little clear speech.

A transcript tool cannot read captions that do not exist either. More causes and fixes are in YouTube captions not working.

If you own the channel, open YouTube Studio, go to Subtitles, pick the video and language, and use the menu next to the caption track to download the file. This only works for videos on channels you manage.