YouTube Shorts Transcript Generator & Subtitle Downloader

Download Subtitles as TXT, SRT or VTT

The same captions come as three files, for three different jobs:

• TXT — plain text, for reading, quoting or pasting into a document or an AI chat. With Timestamps on, every line starts with the moment it is said, like [0:18].
• SRT — numbered subtitles with a start and an end time each, the file video editors and players expect: Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, CapCut, VLC, and YouTube Studio itself.
• VTT — WebVTT, the subtitle format of the web, for HTML5 video players and most online platforms.

SRT and VTT always keep their start and end times, whatever Timestamps is set to: the timing is what makes them subtitles, and a player or an editor will not open one without it. For the words alone, take the TXT.

Every file is UTF-8 text, so accents, emoji and non-Latin scripts come through intact.

Creator and Auto-Generated Captions in Any Language

A video can carry two kinds of captions. Those written by the creator — often in several languages — are listed first, and are as accurate as whoever wrote them. Auto-generated captions are YouTube’s own speech recognition in the language spoken; they are marked as such, can miss punctuation, and now and then get a name or a slang word wrong.

When a video has more than one track, pick it in the Captions menu above the text and the transcript switches in place. Machine translations of the automatic track are left out on purpose: a translation of a guess is rarely worth reading.

Works for Full-Length YouTube Videos Too

Unlike the Shorts downloader, the transcript generator takes any YouTube video, however long: a lecture, a podcast episode or a two-hour stream that has finished. Only the caption file is fetched, never the video, so a long transcript is ready as quickly as a short one. Paste a youtube.com/watch?v=… or youtu.be/… link the same way as a Short.

What to Do with a Transcript

• Quote a Short word for word in an article, a post or a school paper
• Turn a talk into notes, or paste it into an AI assistant for a summary
• Translate it, or follow along in a language you are learning
• Reuse your own Shorts: subtitles for a re-upload, a caption for another platform, a blog post from a video
• Find the moment a word is said in a long video — the timestamps take you there

Why Some Shorts Have No Transcript

A transcript is only as good as the captions behind it. A Short that is only music, sound effects or text on screen has no speech for YouTube to recognise, and creators rarely caption one by hand — so there is nothing to fetch. Automatic captions also take a while to appear after an upload, do not exist for every language, and can be switched off by the creator. Private, deleted and age-restricted videos cannot be opened at all.

When there is nothing to show, this page says so rather than inventing text, and offers to save the video’s sound as an MP3 instead.