Paste a YouTube link and get clean, readable text from a lecture, podcast, tutorial or two-hour interview.
Get a YouTube transcript →Usually there is something there, which makes YouTube the easiest platform on this list to pull text from. YouTube has produced automatic captions across a huge share of its library for years, so most uploads you open have a caption track sitting behind the CC button whether or not the channel ever touched it. Plenty of creators also upload their own subtitle files, and those read far better than the machine pass.
Usually is not always. A track can be missing on a fresh upload that is still processing, on videos where the creator switched captions off, on clips that are almost entirely music, and on speech in a language the system never locked onto confidently. Long uploads in less widely spoken languages are the most common gap.
There is a second catch that has nothing to do with whether captions exist: whether anything can reach them. Members-only videos, age-restricted uploads and private links will render a player for a signed-in human and hand out nothing to a tool that is not signed in as you.
YouTube's automatic captions are built to be read one line at a time under a moving picture. They come out as short timed fragments, often with little punctuation, names in lowercase and no sign of who is speaking. Copy a raw grab into a document and you get a paragraph-free block that runs straight through the ends of sentences.
They also fumble the words you most wanted. Proper nouns, product names, acronyms, figures with units, anything said quickly or over laughter: that is where a machine pass slips, and that is usually the reason you went looking for the transcript in the first place. Two hosts talking across each other or a strong regional accent makes it worse.
So the real job is rarely finding captions. It is getting captions and then getting them into a shape you can read, search and quote. A ninety-minute interview runs well past ten thousand words. You want that punctuated and broken into paragraphs, not sitting in nine hundred caption cues.
YouTube is where the long stuff lives, so the uses skew toward reading instead of rewatching.
Some failures are fixable and some are not. The honest list:
If a video is public and simply has captions turned off, that is not a dead end. That is the case AI transcription exists for.
Paste the link and JotVox checks for an existing caption track first. When one is there, you get the text straight away, free, with no account and no credits spent. That covers a large share of YouTube on its own.
When there is no usable track, JotVox transcribes the audio instead: 98%+ accuracy across 99 languages, which handles captions-off uploads and non-English talks that YouTube never processed. That path uses one credit. Every new account starts with 3 free credits and gets 1 free AI transcription a day once the email is verified.
From there, export plain TXT for reading and note-taking, SRT or VTT when you need timed subtitles for an editor or a re-upload, or MP3 if you just wanted the audio. AI summaries turn a long upload into key takeaways, chapters, quotes or a timeline, which is the quickest route to show notes. Audio is processed in memory and deleted right after transcription.
1. Copy the video URL Open the video and copy the link from your browser's address bar, or tap Share and then Copy link in the mobile app. A youtu.be short link works, and so does a link with a timestamp on the end.
2. Paste it into JotVox Drop the URL into the box on JotVox. It looks for YouTube's existing caption track first, which costs nothing and needs no sign-up.
3. Run AI transcription if captions are missing For uploads with captions switched off, or audio YouTube never processed, transcribe from the audio instead. One credit covers it, in any of 99 languages.
4. Export or summarise Download TXT for notes, SRT or VTT for timed subtitles, or MP3 for the audio. Or generate a summary with chapters and quotes if you only need the shape of the video.
Yes. When a YouTube video already has a caption track, JotVox pulls it with no account and no credits. That covers most public uploads, since YouTube auto-generates captions widely. You only need an account for AI transcription, which is the fallback for videos with captions turned off, and for summaries and MP3 downloads.
Because it came from YouTube's automatic caption track, which is written to be read one line at a time under the player rather than as prose. Those tracks typically arrive as unpunctuated fragments with lowercase names. If you want properly punctuated, paragraphed text, run AI transcription on the same video instead and JotVox transcribes the audio from scratch.
Yes. Shorts work the same way as any other YouTube URL, so paste the link and JotVox checks for a caption track before falling back to AI transcription. Shorts are more likely than long-form uploads to lean on music and fast delivery, so the AI path often produces cleaner text than the auto-caption track does.
Export as SRT or VTT rather than TXT. Both formats carry timecodes alongside the text, so you can jump back to the exact moment in the video or load the file into a subtitle editor. If you want time markers for show notes rather than subtitles, an AI summary with chapters gives you a timeline instead of cue-by-cue timings.
Because the video is not being served to a signed-out request. Private videos, members-only uploads, age-restricted content and region-blocked videos all sit behind a check that JotVox cannot pass on your behalf. There is no workaround for this. If the video was public and has since been removed or made private, the content is simply no longer retrievable.