How do I get the transcript of a YouTube video?

YouTube's help page on viewing transcripts keeps it short. In the video's description, click Show transcript, and a panel opens with the captions laid out as lines of text. The panel follows playback to the line being spoken, and clicking a line moves the video to that moment. On a phone you tap a line instead of clicking it. According to the same page, the full transcript is there for any video that has captions.

The page covers reading along and jumping around, and it names no button for copying or downloading. On a computer you can usually drag across the lines in the panel and paste them into a document, sometimes with the time of each line attached, which leaves some tidying by hand. On a phone, selecting a long transcript is slow going.

Everything here rests on captions. YouTube's page on automatic captions says it can use speech recognition to create them for long-form videos and Shorts, in dozens of languages, and warns that their quality may vary with accents, dialects and background noise. Among the reasons it gives for a video having none: the captions are not ready yet after an upload, the language is not supported, the video is too long, the sound is poor, it opens with a long silence, or people talk over each other.

A transcript pasted into a notes app turns into a wall of text with no summary and no way back to the video. scrollandlearn keeps the same caption text tied to the video it came from and writes the short version above it.

1. Copy the address: in the YouTube app, tap Share under the video and pick Copy link; on a computer, copy what is in the address bar. Links to Shorts and to regular videos both work.
2. Paste it into Add: open scrollandlearn in any browser, tap Add and paste. There is no form to fill in.
3. Wait for the lesson: the caption text is read and the lesson is written from it, usually within a minute.
4. Open Show transcript: near the end of the lesson, tap Show transcript and the caption text unfolds below it as plain paragraphs. Tap again to fold it away. Watch the original on YouTube sits right under it.
5. Read the top first: the core idea in one line, the key points, Remember this and, when the video suggests one, Try this, all written from that transcript.
6. Take a passage with you: select the text under Show transcript as you would on any web page and paste it where you need it. Copy lesson and Export lessons carry the lesson and leave the transcript out.

Below is an example of the lesson a YouTube tutorial on writing prompts becomes. Each key point condenses a stretch of the spoken explanation, and the question is the one Today's quiz brings back later.

From a YouTube link, scrollandlearn builds the transcript from the video's caption track and from nothing else. The track can be in any language: the app takes the video's own track as it is, whether the video is in Portuguese, Japanese or Croatian. The language of the lesson is a separate choice under Settings > Lesson language. A new account writes lessons in English, and Same as the post keeps the language of the video.

The speech itself is never transcribed from a YouTube link. A video where someone talks clearly but has no caption track gives only its title, and on video platforms a lesson is never made from a title alone. Subtitles that an editing app burned into the picture are not a caption track either, because words are not read off the frames of a video.

That makes YouTube's own button a handy test before you paste. When Show transcript appears in the description, the video has captions, and its link should come back as a lesson.

When a video has no captions, its lesson screen says so and offers Upload the video. Pick the file and our server transcribes its sound, so for an upload the speech is what becomes the transcript. You can also start from Add: type / and choose Video file.

This helps only when you have the file, such as a video you made or a clip a colleague passed on. Files can be up to 50 MB, or 8 MB on a guest account, and up to 6 hours long.

Transcribing a file uses your plan's transcription minutes for the month: Starter includes 100, Creator 250 and Power 1,000, the same as each plan's number of saves. A YouTube link with captions uses no minutes, since nothing is transcribed, though each lesson still counts as one of the month's saves. When the minutes run out, the upload shows Upgrade and Try again instead of a lesson.

Private videos and removed ones can't be read from their link at all. Upload the file if you have it, and run a link that failed for some other reason through again with Try again.

A lesson from a link is written from the whole transcript. A ten-minute tutorial gets a key point for each thing it teaches; a two-hour podcast or a full lecture comes back in sections, one for every part of about 20 minutes.

The caption text behind Show transcript is kept as it arrived, beyond that point too, and search reads all of it. A sentence from the last half hour of an interview can still be found by its exact words, even though no key point mentions it. When a later point matters to you, add it to the key points with Edit lesson or write it into My takeaway.

Search needs every word you type, and inside a transcript the words must be spelled the way the captions spell them, because there is no typo tolerance there. If automatic captions misheard a name, search for the misheard version, and check names and numbers against the video before you quote them. A hit in a transcript shows a passage of about 200 characters around the first place your words appear.

• Show times: it carries no timestamps. To hear a line in context, open Watch the original on YouTube and use Show transcript there, where a click on a line jumps to it.
• Change: Edit lesson rewrites the title, core idea, key points, Try this, Remember this and the quiz question. The transcript stays as the captions gave it.
• Go public: your library is private by default, and nobody sees your transcripts but you.

The lesson is the part you keep. It files itself into a topic named after what you keep saving, such as AI prompts, and Today's quiz asks about it on days when it comes due: Forgot brings it back tomorrow, Kind of in 4 days and Knew it in 14, with longer gaps after that.