YouTube Automatic Captions: Turn Them On or Off, Fix Missing Ones, Get the Text (2026)

• On a computer: click CC at the bottom right of the player. Click it again to turn captions off.
• In the YouTube app: tap the player once to show the controls, then tap CC. Tap it again to turn them off.
• On a TV or game console: pause the video, choose Captions, then pick a language.

YouTube's rule for all three: "If you don't see Closed captions, then Closed Captions (CC) aren't available for this video." Sources: Manage caption settings and captions on TV.

• Always on (app): profile picture, Settings, Captions, turn on Show captions.
• Another language: open the captions menu and pick a language. If yours is not listed, YouTube's mobile instructions say to choose Auto-translate, then the language.
• Style (computer): Settings, Subtitles/CC, Options. You can change the font, colour, size, background and window opacity. In the app, the setting is Caption size and style.

YouTube's help documents the always-on and auto-translate steps for the app only; we did not find desktop equivalents on its pages.

Of 24,478 videos with a known caption type that people fetched through our service between May 2025 and November 2026, 23,238 (94.9%) had automatic captions and 1,240 (5.1%) had captions the creator wrote or uploaded. The sample is what our users asked for, not a random draw from YouTube.

Speech rate is almost the same either way: English automatic captions come in at 162 words per minute, creator-written ones at 153. More numbers, with the method, are in YouTube captions by the numbers.

YouTube publishes no accuracy figure. Its automatic captions page says they "might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise" and asks creators to review them.

What we see in the files: punctuation is unreliable, names and product terms get misspelled, and music produces cues like [Music] with little else. English automatic captions can also be "expressive", which YouTube describes as showing speech intensity in capitals and sounds such as sighs.

YouTube lists these causes:

• They are not ready yet. Processing time "depends on the complexity of the video's audio".
• The language is not supported for automatic captions.
• The video is too long (YouTube gives no limit).
• Poor sound, or speech YouTube does not recognize.
• A long silence at the start of the video.
• Several people talking over each other, or several languages at once.

Live streams get automatic captions in English only. For a viewer-side checklist, see YouTube captions not working.

• Languages: YouTube lists the supported languages on its automatic captions page without giving a count; we counted 67 on 12 November 2026. Captions come in the video's default language only.
• Edit: YouTube Studio, Subtitles, pick the video, then the menu next to the automatic track and Duplicate and edit. Your edits become a new caption track.
• Remove: delete the track from the same menu (Edit or remove captions). YouTube's help does not describe a switch that stops automatic captions on uploads.
• Word filter: a Studio setting replaces potentially inappropriate words with [ __ ] in automatic captions by default.

YouTube shows captions on the video but has no download button for them. Paste the link into our transcript generator to read and copy the text, or use the transcript downloader to save it as TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON, Markdown or CSV. Developers can use yt-dlp or our transcript API.