YouTube makes it surprisingly inconvenient to download a transcript from a video. There are plenty of transcript-downloading websites, but many are loaded with ads, require an account, impose limits, or simply don’t work.
The easiest option I’ve found is SMRY.ai’s YouTube Transcript tool:
https://smry.ai/youtube-transcript
Paste the URL of a YouTube video into the page and SMRY.ai will retrieve the transcript.
The Even Faster Way
There’s an easier trick if you already have the YouTube video open.
Just add:
smry.ai/
in front of the YouTube URL.
For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
becomes:
https://smry.ai/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
That takes you directly to SMRY.ai, where you can access the video’s transcript without hunting for a transcript downloader again.
Downloading YouTube Transcripts from Linux
If you’re downloading transcripts regularly, or need transcripts from several videos, yt-dlp is another option.
To retrieve English subtitles without downloading the actual video:
yt-dlp --skip-download --write-subs --write-auto-subs \
--sub-langs "en.*" --convert-subs srt \
"YOUTUBE_URL"
This attempts to download English subtitles supplied with the video as well as YouTube’s automatically generated captions.
The result isn’t quite as convenient as SMRY.ai because you’ll get a subtitle file rather than a simple block of transcript text. But it’s useful for bulk downloads or when you’d rather work entirely from the command line.
The Short Version
For the occasional YouTube transcript, use:
https://smry.ai/youtube-transcript
Or, even easier, prepend smry.ai/ to the YouTube URL.
For frequent or bulk transcript downloads, use yt-dlp.
Mostly, I’m writing this down so the next time I need a YouTube transcript, I don’t spend 15 minutes searching for a website that actually works.
