OpenShortsYouTube transcript generator
Paste a link to a YouTube video and get its transcript with timestamps. Copy it, or download it as a TXT or SRT file. Free, no account.
Any public video with captions, including YouTube's auto-generated ones. Watch, youtu.be, Shorts and live links all work.
Want the best moments of this video as vertical clips with subtitles? OpenShorts cuts it into 3 to 15 shorts. 20 free minutes a month.
How it works
The tool asks YouTube for the captions the video already has. If the creator uploaded subtitles in the language spoken in the video, you get those, because a human wrote them. If not, you get YouTube's automatic captions, which are speech recognition and read like it: no punctuation on older videos, and names spelled the way they sound. When a video has several tracks, the menu above the transcript switches between them. Machine translations are not offered, because they are not what was said.
Timestamps link to that moment of the video. Copy takes the text as shown (with or without timestamps), TXT saves the same thing to a file, and SRT gives you a subtitle file you can load into Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, CapCut or back into YouTube Studio.
Try it with a real video
These were checked on 23 September 2026. Click one to run it:
- Tim Urban, "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator" (TED, 14 min). 315 caption lines from the English track TED uploaded; the menu offers 50 tracks.
- Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement address (15 min). 244 caption lines; 9 tracks in the menu.
- Will Stephen, "How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk" (6 min). 128 caption lines, a good short test.
When there is no transcript
Some videos have no captions at all: music, very new uploads that YouTube has not processed yet, and channels that turned automatic captions off. Private, members-only and age-restricted videos cannot be read either. In those cases the tool says so rather than inventing text. If you need the words anyway, the OpenShorts clip generator runs its own speech recognition with word-level timing and uses it to cut the video into subtitled vertical clips.
What people use a transcript for
- Quoting a talk or an interview accurately, with the timestamp as the citation.
- Turning a video into a blog post, a newsletter or show notes.
- Pasting it into ChatGPT or Claude to summarise, find a moment or draft chapters.
- Editing: an SRT lines the words up with the timeline in any video editor.
Common questions
- Is the YouTube transcript generator free?
- Yes. There is no account and no payment. To keep it fast for everyone it allows 10 transcripts per 10 minutes from the same network.
- Does it work on videos with only auto-generated captions?
- Yes. When the creator has not uploaded subtitles, the tool returns YouTube's automatic captions in the language spoken in the video and labels them as auto-generated.
- Why does it say a video has no captions?
- Because YouTube has none for it: no uploaded subtitles and no automatic track. That happens with music, with very recent uploads and when a channel disables automatic captions. Private, members-only and age-restricted videos cannot be read at all.
- Can I download the transcript as SRT?
- Yes. The SRT button saves a subtitle file with one cue per caption line, which video editors and YouTube Studio can import.
- Do you store the transcripts?
- The server keeps the result for up to 24 hours so that the same video is not fetched from YouTube twice, and nothing is tied to you.