How do I get a transcript from a YouTube video?
Paste a YouTube URL into the app and it returns the full transcript. Two paths run behind that single action. If the video already has captions — auto-generated by YouTube or uploaded by the creator — the app pulls that track directly, which is the fast path and is free and unlimited with no account. If the video has no captions at all, the app can transcribe the audio itself using Google's Gemini model; that is a Premium feature and covers videos up to 1 hour when you request it directly, or up to 2 hours on the automatic fallback. The result is the same either way: a readable transcript with timestamps that you can scroll, copy line by line, translate into 134+ languages, or export as a PDF. Whichever path produced it, the transcript is stored with the video, so returning to it later is instant and costs nothing further.
Is the YouTube transcript generator free?
Transcripts from videos that already carry YouTube captions are free and unlimited, and you do not need an account to read, copy or export them. What costs money is the work that runs an AI model: transcribing a video that has no captions of its own, translating a transcript into another language, writing a summary, and generating flashcards or a quiz. Those are Premium features. The split is deliberate — reading text YouTube already published is cheap for us to serve, while running speech recognition or a language model over an hour of audio is not. If you mostly want to read and search what was said in videos that already have captions, the free tier covers that completely and indefinitely. There is no trial clock on the free path either — it does not lapse into a paid tier after a period of use.
Can I copy and export the transcript?
Yes. The full transcript copies to the clipboard in one action, and it also exports to a formatted PDF rather than a raw text dump — the document carries the video title and its source link, so months later you can still tell where the text came from. The PDF goes through the standard iOS and Android share sheet, which means you can save it to Files or Drive, mail it to yourself, drop it into a note-taking app, or send it to someone else. Individual lines can be copied with their timestamps when you only need one quote rather than the whole thing. Content you have already fetched stays on the device, so an exported transcript can be reopened and shared again without a connection. Translations and summaries of the same video export through the identical route, so one video can leave the app in several forms.
Does it work for long videos and live streams?
It works for any standard public YouTube video — lectures, podcasts, documentaries, conference talks. When the video already has captions there is no length limit at all, because the app is reading a track YouTube has already produced. Length only matters on the AI path: a directly requested AI transcription accepts videos up to 1 hour, and the automatic fallback used for caption-less videos accepts up to 2 hours. Live streams are a special case — while a stream is still broadcasting there is no complete audio track to work from, so it has to end and be archived as a normal video first. Private and unlisted videos never work, on any tier, because YouTube's API does not expose them to third-party apps. Once a stream has been archived it behaves like any other video, so the usual caption and AI paths both apply to it.
What if the YouTube video has no captions?
When a video has no caption track, the app falls back to transcribing the audio itself with Google's Gemini model. You do not have to do anything differently — the fallback triggers automatically once the caption lookup comes back empty, and typical videos come back in a couple of minutes. The output is punctuated, readable text rather than a raw stream of words, and from there it behaves like any other transcript: translatable, summarisable, exportable to PDF. This path is a Premium feature because it runs speech recognition over the whole audio track, and it accepts videos up to 2 hours. If a video is longer than that, or is private, unlisted or still live, the app tells you which of those it hit instead of failing quietly. Once generated, the transcript is stored with the video, so reopening it later neither re-runs the transcription nor costs anything more.
