Paste a YouTube link and read the full transcript right here. Free, no signup needed. Sign up when you want AI summaries, chapters, and saved history.
Free, no signup needed. Reads the video’s caption track, 3 videos a day per visitor.
Updated
Copy the link of any public YouTube video and paste it into Scrivi. We support standard watch links, shorts, and shared URLs.
Scrivi fetches the video's captions and presents the full transcript in a clean, scrollable view — ready to read, copy, or download.
Generate an AI-powered summary with key points, chapters, topics, and action items. Pro users can ask follow-up questions about the content.
Every public YouTube video with captions carries a text track behind the CC button. The widget above reads that track and shows it to you in full, without an account, a download, or a browser extension. Because it reads text that already exists rather than listening to the audio, a two-hour lecture comes back about as fast as a two-minute clip.
There are two honest limits. First, the widget only works when the video has a caption track, whether YouTube generated it automatically or the creator uploaded it. If there is no track at all, there is nothing to read instantly. Second, it is capped at 3 videos a day per visitor, which keeps the free path sustainable for everyone. A free Scrivi account raises that to 20 caption transcriptions a day and adds saved history, search, and export.
Videos without any captions can still be transcribed, but that takes real speech-to-text on the audio, which costs us money per minute. That path is part of the $2.99 Day Pass (24 hours) and the Pro plan. The free tier stays captions-only so nobody gets surprised by a paywall halfway through.
A transcript turns a video from something you watch into something you can search, quote, and skim. Once the text is in front of you, use Ctrl+F to find the one sentence you came for instead of scrubbing the timeline.
YouTube offers two kinds of caption tracks. Auto-generated captions are produced by YouTube's speech recognition for most videos in supported languages. They are usually good enough to read and search, but punctuation is sparse and names, jargon, and heavy accents can come out wrong. Uploaded captions are written or reviewed by the creator, so they tend to be cleaner and include proper sentence breaks.
Scrivi prefers the uploaded track when one exists and falls back to the auto-generated one otherwise. Either way you get the transcript in the language of the track, so a Spanish video comes back in Spanish, not forced through English. Inside the app the interface itself is available in 16 languages.
If you need clean prose, the AI summary in the app is often the quickest fix: it rewrites the key content into structured key points and chapters, which sidesteps most of the raw-caption roughness.
A few small habits save time when you transcribe YouTube regularly.
If YouTube is the only platform you care about, several tools do a fine job. youtube-transcript.io and DownSub are quick caption readers with free tiers; Tactiq and NoteGPT wrap a YouTube transcript in a browser extension or a summarizer with a monthly quota. All of them are reasonable choices, and for a single YouTube video the difference between them and Scrivi is small.
Scrivi is built for people whose research does not stop at YouTube. The same paste-a-link flow also works for Instagram Reels, TikTok, X (Twitter), and Facebook videos, so a creator comparing hooks across platforms or a researcher collecting sources from wherever they were posted keeps everything in one place. On top of the transcript you get AI summaries with key points and chapters, full-text search across your history, collections, and cross-video research reports that synthesize several transcripts into one document.
The trade-off is equally plain: the free tier is captions-only, so a captionless video on any platform needs a Day Pass or Pro. Tools that run speech-to-text for free on every request will transcribe those without asking; they usually pay for it with tighter minute caps, slower results, or a login wall. Pick whichever matches what you actually transcribe.
The instant widget does not require an email, a cookie consent beyond the site basics, or a card. The URL you paste is used to fetch the caption track and nothing else. Transcripts fetched by the widget are not attached to a profile because there is none; if you sign up, your saved transcripts are private to your account and can be deleted at any time.
Limits at a glance: 3 instant transcripts a day per visitor without an account; 20 caption transcriptions and 3 AI summaries a day on the free plan; unlimited fair-use transcription, AI audio transcription up to 60 minutes per video, Ask AI, batch transcription of up to 10 URLs, collections, and research reports on Pro ($9.99 a month, $59.99 a year) or Lifetime ($79.99 once). The $2.99 Day Pass gives you 24 hours of Pro when you only need it occasionally.
Scrivi detects the video's caption language automatically and displays the transcript in its original language. The interface itself supports 16 locales.
Turn hour-long videos into concise summaries with chapters, topics, and action items — all generated by AI in seconds.
Download the full transcript or the AI summary as a professionally formatted PDF for offline reading, archiving, or sharing.
Transcripts are fetched directly from YouTube's caption data, so you get results in seconds — no waiting for audio processing.
Paste a video URL and get the full transcript in seconds. Free to start, no credit card required.
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