Get a fully timestamped, accurate transcript of any YouTube lecture — YouTube works through our free Chrome extension, which reads the video's caption track from your own browser session; upload a recording instead and OpenAI Whisper transcribes the audio directly. No account needed, free to start.
How It Works
No software to install, no account to create. Just paste a URL and you're done.
Upload a recording, or paste a Loom, Dailymotion or direct video link. For YouTube, our free Chrome extension handles it in one click — YouTube blocks downloads from datacentre servers.
OpenAI Whisper processes the audio with industry-leading accuracy. The model handles accents, background noise, and technical vocabulary automatically.
Copy the full text or download as plain text, SRT, or VTT. Every line includes accurate timestamps so you can jump to any moment in the video.
Features
Built for students, researchers, content creators, and developers who need reliable video transcripts fast.
Every line is tagged with a precise timestamp so you can click back to any moment in the video. Perfect for citations and research.
Download subtitle-ready files in SRT (SubRip) or VTT (WebVTT) format. Drop them directly into any video editor or player.
Whisper supports over 100 languages including Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, and many more — with no language setting required.
The transcript intelligently segments speech so you can follow conversations and interviews with clear speaker separation cues.
The entire transcript is rendered as searchable plain text. Use Ctrl+F to find any word or phrase in seconds — no more scrubbing through video.
Unlike raw auto-captions, VideoNoteGPT adds proper punctuation, capitalization, and paragraph breaks — ready to read or copy into a document.
Worth Knowing
YouTube's panel shows auto-captions, and auto-captions are generated selectively — plenty of lecture recordings, conference talks and older uploads have none at all. Transcribing from the audio sidesteps that entirely: if there is speech, there is a transcript.
The two things auto-captions handle worst are exactly the two things academic video is full of: unfamiliar technical vocabulary and non-native or regional accents. Whisper was trained on a far broader spread of accented speech, which is why the gap is most obvious on precisely the recordings you need a transcript for.
Auto-captions arrive as an unbroken stream of lowercase words. That is fine to read along with while the video plays, and close to useless as a document — you cannot skim it, quote from it, or hand it to another tool. A properly punctuated transcript with sentence boundaries is a different artefact.
In roughly the order we see it:
If notes are what you are really after rather than the raw text, the lecture summarizer gives you chapters, key points and defined terms from the same transcription — same upload, more structure.
FAQ
Everything you need to know about getting transcripts from YouTube videos.
Can I paste a YouTube link right now?
Not directly, and we would rather say so than waste your time. YouTube blocks downloads originating from datacentre servers, which is what every web app runs on — so our server cannot fetch the audio. Two routes work: install our free Chrome extension, which pulls the audio through your own browser session so YouTube sees you rather than us, or download the video yourself and upload the file. Uploads, Loom, Dailymotion and direct MP4/MP3 links all work without any of this.
Is the transcript generator free?
You get 6 free credits with no sign-up and no card. A video under 15 minutes costs 1 credit, 15–45 minutes costs 2. If a transcript fails to generate the credits are returned automatically — you are never charged for something that did not work.
Does it work on videos with no captions?
Yes. That is the main reason to use it over YouTube's own transcript panel. We transcribe from the audio with OpenAI Whisper rather than reading existing subtitles, so videos that were never captioned work exactly the same as ones that were.
How accurate is it, honestly?
Whisper reaches roughly 95% word accuracy on clear speech, and it handles accents noticeably better than YouTube's auto-captions. It degrades on three things: several people talking over each other, heavy background noise, and unfamiliar proper nouns or jargon. Anything shown only on screen and never spoken will not appear at all — it listens rather than reads. The full transcript is always shown so you can check anything that looks wrong.
Which download format should I pick?
Plain text if you are pasting into notes or feeding it to another tool. SRT if you are adding subtitles to a video — it is the most widely supported subtitle format there is. VTT if the video will play on the web, since HTML5 players expect it. All three carry timestamps.
Is my video kept on your servers?
Files are deleted within 24 hours of processing, and nothing you submit is used to train AI models. See the Privacy Policy.
6 free credits, no sign-up, and failed jobs are refunded automatically.
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