How to get a transcript of a YouTube video

Key Takeaways

• Fastest way: paste the video URL into a free transcript tool and copy the full text with timestamps in seconds.
• Built-in way: YouTube's own "Show transcript" panel (description → "…more" → Show transcript) works but is fiddly to copy from.
• Transcripts come from the video's caption track — manual captions when the creator uploaded them, auto-generated otherwise.
• If a video has no captions at all, no tool can produce a transcript; that is a YouTube limitation, not a tool problem.
• If the transcript is just a means to a summary, a one-click summarizer like Zloth skips the transcript step entirely.

Method 1: paste the URL into a free transcript tool (fastest)

1. Copy the video URL — a watch link, a short youtu.be link, or a Shorts link all work.
2. Paste it into the free YouTube transcript generator and click Get Transcript.
3. Copy the result — plain text, or with [mm:ss] timestamps if you need to reference moments.

No signup, no install. The tool reads the caption track YouTube already stores for the video, so the result is instant.

Method 2: YouTube's built-in transcript panel

1. Open the video on YouTube (desktop browser).
2. Below the video, expand the description ("…more").
3. Scroll down and click "Show transcript".
4. The transcript opens in a panel beside the video; toggle timestamps via the three-dot menu.

Good for reading along. The catch: copying is fiddly — selecting across the panel grabs timestamps and text in awkward chunks, and there is no copy button. For anything you want to paste elsewhere, Method 1 is cleaner.

Method 3: when there are no captions

A transcript can only exist if the video has a caption track. No captions means every transcript tool comes up empty.

Your options then: check back later (YouTube auto-generates captions for many videos within hours of upload), or run the audio through a speech-to-text service yourself — real transcription, more effort.

Auto-generated captions are usually good enough for summaries and reference, but expect mangled names and technical terms.

What most people do with the transcript

The most common next step is pasting it into an AI for a summary — we wrote up that exact workflow in how to summarize a YouTube video with ChatGPT.

If that is your end goal every time, you can skip the transcript step entirely: the Zloth Chrome extension summarizes any video in one click from its thumbnail, with clickable timestamps, and saves every summary to your library.