Have a recording instead? Upload it and Whisper transcribes the audio, no captions needed.
📱 On a phone? The extension needs a laptop. Upload a recording from your phone, or open this page on a computer.
How It Works
No account to create. Open the video with our Chrome extension, or upload a recording directly.
Have a recording instead? Upload it and Whisper transcribes the audio, no captions needed.
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 find 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 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 reads the video's caption track through your own browser session so YouTube sees you rather than us, or download the video yourself and upload the file — our video transcript generator covers that route, MP4, MOV and MKV included. Uploads, Loom, Dailymotion and direct MP4/MP3 links all work without any of this.
Is the transcript generator free?
You get 3 free lectures a day with no sign-up and no card. Every video counts as one lecture, whatever its length. If a transcript fails to generate it is not counted against your daily total — you are never charged for something that did not work.
Does it work on videos with no captions?
For uploaded audio and video recordings, OpenAI Whisper transcribes the spoken audio itself, so captions play no part. For YouTube videos, the free Chrome extension reads existing captions from your browser session, so the YouTube video must have captions enabled.
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.
3 free lectures a day, no sign-up, and failed jobs are not counted automatically.
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