YouTube Transcript free
Get the transcript of any YouTube video
Paste a link and get the full text of the video, with timestamps you can click. Copy it, download it, or turn it into notes and flashcards. Your first video is free — no account.
How it works step by step
01Paste the YouTube link
Standard youtube.com links, youtu.be short links, /shorts, and /live links all work, as does a bare video ID. The video needs captions — either the creator's own or YouTube's automatic ones, which most videos have by default.
02The full text appears
You get the complete transcript, not an excerpt. Where YouTube provides caption timings, each line is timestamped and clicking a timestamp opens the video at that exact moment.
03Copy, download, or search it
Copy the whole transcript to the clipboard in one click, or download it as a plain text file. Because it is text, your browser's find function works on it — which is the fastest way to locate the one sentence you half-remember from an hour-long talk.
04Turn it into study material
If the video is a lecture, the transcript is source material. One click sends it into Deckio to become structured notes, flashcards, or a quiz, so you can be tested on the content instead of only reading it.
What a transcript is actually good for
Video is a terrible format for finding things. There is no way to scan it, no way to search it, and no way to quote from it without scrubbing back and forth through a timeline. A transcript fixes all three at once: the content becomes searchable text you can skim in a fraction of the runtime.
For students, the specific win is citation and revision. If a lecturer defined a term precisely at 47 minutes in, the transcript gives you their exact wording to put in your notes, rather than your best paraphrase from memory. For researchers and writers, it is the difference between quoting a source accurately and approximately.
And once the lecture is text, it stops being something you have to sit through. It becomes material — the same as a PDF or a set of notes — which means it can be turned into flashcards, a quiz, or a structured summary and revised in minutes instead of hours.
Questions answered
Does the transcript include timestamps?
Yes, when YouTube exposes caption timings for the video — which is the normal case. Each line is labelled with its time, and clicking it opens the video at that point. If a video only exposes plain caption text, you still get the complete transcript without timings.
Is it free?
Your first video is free with no account. After that you need a free Deckio account, which takes about ten seconds and does not need a card. Signed-in users get 25 videos a day at no cost.
Which videos work?
Any public YouTube video that has captions — either the creator's own subtitles or YouTube's auto-generated ones. That covers the overwhelming majority of lectures, tutorials, talks, and podcasts. Videos with captions disabled, and private or age-restricted videos, cannot be read.
Is there a length limit?
No. Three-hour lectures and full podcast episodes work. Longer videos take longer to process, since the whole transcript has to be read before anything is written.
Does it work for videos that are not in English?
Yes. Transcripts are pulled in whatever language the captions are in, and the summary is written in that same language.
Do you store the videos I paste?
No. The transcript is fetched, used to build your output, and returned to your browser. Deckio does not keep a copy of the video or the transcript unless you choose to save the result as study material in your account.
Can I download the transcript?
Yes. You can copy the full text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file, with or without timestamps.
Don’t just read the video.
Remember it.
Deckio turns lectures, PDFs, and notes into flashcards and quizzes, then schedules every review for the moment before you’d forget.
100 cards a month, free forever. No credit card.
Related: YouTube summarizer·YouTube to flashcards·Lecture to flashcards·Notes to flashcards
