How to Show & Copy a Transcript on YouTube (Step-by-Step)

YouTube has a built-in transcript feature that lets you read the captions of most videos as text. It's useful for a quick look at what was said, but copying the text out of YouTube takes a few steps. Here's exactly how to do it on desktop and mobile, plus what to do when it doesn't work.

1. Open the YouTube video you want to transcribe in your browser.
2. Look below the video player. You'll see buttons for Like, Share, Download, etc. To the right of these, there's a three-dot menu icon (•••). Click it.
3. Click "Show transcript" from the dropdown. A panel will slide open to the right of the video showing timestamped text.
4. Toggle timestamps (optional). At the top of the transcript panel, click the three-dot menu and select "Toggle timestamps" if you want to remove the timestamp prefixes from each line.
5. Select and copy the text. Click inside the transcript panel, press Ctrl+A (or Cmd+A on Mac) to select all text, then Ctrl+C (or Cmd+C) to copy it to your clipboard.

Paste the text into a document, and you're done. Note that the text will be in YouTube's raw caption format: short fragments of 2-5 words per line, each prefixed with a timestamp. If you need clean, paragraph-style text, you'll need to reformat it manually or use a tool like TubeScript that does this automatically.

The YouTube mobile app handles transcripts differently than desktop. The option is there, but it's buried deeper in the interface.

1. Open the video in the YouTube app.
2. Tap the video title or the downward arrow next to it to expand the description area.
3. Scroll down and look for a "Show transcript" button. It's usually near the bottom of the expanded description.
4. Tap it to view the transcript. On mobile, you can long-press to select text, but selecting large amounts of text is cumbersome.

The mobile experience is frustrating for copying full transcripts. There's no "Select All" equivalent, and you have to scroll and select manually. If you need the full text, it's faster to open tubescript.cc in your mobile browser and paste the video link there.

Sometimes the transcript option is missing entirely. This usually happens for one of these reasons:

• Captions are disabled. The video uploader can turn off captions entirely. When this happens, there's no transcript to show.
• It's a YouTube Short. Shorts don't have the transcript feature. You'll need to use an alternative method for Shorts transcripts.
• The video is a livestream in progress. Live videos don't have transcripts until after the stream ends and YouTube processes the recording.
• Age-restricted or private videos. Some restricted videos limit access to the transcript feature.

In any of these cases, you can try pasting the video URL into TubeScript. It pulls from additional caption sources and can often extract text even when YouTube's built-in panel isn't available.

YouTube's transcript feature works, but it's designed for reading captions alongside the video, not for extracting clean text. If you regularly need to copy, save, or share transcript text, TubeScript is built specifically for that. Paste a URL, get formatted text with one click. No scrolling through caption fragments, no manual cleanup.

For a full comparison of YouTube's built-in feature versus TubeScript, see our detailed side-by-side comparison.