Three steps to download YouTube subtitles: paste the URL, click Transcribe, choose SRT, VTT, or TXT. No browser extension, no install, no signup.
Real transcript + AI summary, ready in seconds.
“So today I want to talk about the three biggest mistakes people make when trying to grow on TikTok. And I see this constantly — creators spending hours on production value when what actually drives growth is the hook. The first fifteen seconds. That’s it.”
“If you don’t have them in the first fifteen seconds, they’re gone. So let me walk you through exactly what I changed — and how it took my average view duration from twenty-two percent all the way up to sixty-eight...”
YouTube doesn't expose a download button for subtitles, but the data is reachable through the video page itself. The standard manual workaround is the three-dot menu under the video → Show transcript → copy and paste into a text editor — slow, lossy, and the result is plain text without timestamps. The faster path is a URL-based downloader that fetches the official caption track directly. Paste any YouTube URL above and the tool returns three downloadable files: SRT (.srt) — the universal subtitle format used by every video editor; WebVTT (.vtt) — the W3C standard required for HTML5 video on a webpage; and plain text (.txt) — the timestamp-free version for reading and content repurposing. The download takes 10-30 seconds for typical videos. Hour-long lectures and full-length podcasts work the same way. The tool reads YouTube's official caption track when one exists, and falls back to AI speech recognition on the audio when no captions are uploaded — so you get a downloadable subtitle file even from videos that creators never captioned themselves.
Paste the YouTube URL into the field above and click Transcribe. When the result loads, click Download and choose SRT, VTT, or TXT format. The whole flow takes under a minute.
YouTube intentionally doesn't expose subtitle downloads to discourage scraping and content repurposing. The captions are still accessible via YouTube's official API; URL-based downloaders fetch them through that API.
When YouTube has no creator-uploaded captions, the tool falls back to AI speech recognition on the audio. You'll get an SRT/VTT/TXT file generated from speech-to-text. Accuracy is around 95% for clear single-speaker English audio.
When YouTube has multiple caption tracks (e.g., creator-uploaded English plus auto-translated Spanish), the tool downloads the primary caption track. For other languages, take the SRT and translate it via DeepL, Google Translate, or ChatGPT.
10-30 seconds for typical YouTube videos. Long videos (1+ hours) take 30-60 seconds. The bottleneck is the YouTube API response time, not the file generation.
No. The tool only works on publicly accessible YouTube videos. Private and unlisted videos require ownership or sharing permissions the tool doesn't have.
Yes. SRT and VTT files are plain text — open them in any text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code), edit the text or timing, and save. Specialised subtitle editors like Aegisub or Subtitle Edit are recommended for heavy editing.
Yes. Paste any YouTube Shorts URL (with /shorts/ in the path) and get the same SRT/VTT/TXT downloads. Shorts have automatic captions on virtually all videos in 2026.
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