YouTube Shorts to text, one link or a hundred
Paste Shorts URLs and read the scripts as text. Where YouTube already has a caption track we use it, which is fast and costs you almost nothing. Where there is no usable track, we fall back to transcribing the audio, so you never get an empty result.
Shorts are the cheapest short-form format to research at scale, precisely because YouTube's automatic captions cover so much of the catalogue. If you are sweeping a niche weekly, this is the platform where your minutes go furthest.
Captions first, speech recognition second
The order matters, and it is the main reason Shorts behave differently from TikTok here. When we resolve a Short we look for a caption track: a human-authored one first, then YouTube's automatic captions in the original spoken language. A clean structured track gets used directly.
If nothing usable exists — captions disabled, a music-only track, a language with no automatic coverage — we transcribe the audio instead. You do not have to know in advance which path a given Short will take; the result looks the same either way.
Regular YouTube videos work too
The same paste box accepts standard YouTube URLs, not only /shorts/ links. A podcast episode, a tutorial, a webinar recording — anything up to 30 minutes per item goes through the same pipeline. If long-form is your main use case, the YouTube transcript guide covers what changes at that length.
Why bulk matters more on Shorts than anywhere else
A single Short tells you almost nothing. The format is so compressed that one video is mostly hook and payoff, with the reasoning invisible. Read thirty Shorts from the same niche and the pattern is obvious within minutes: the same four openings, the same objection handled in the same place, the same call to action phrased six different ways.
That is a batch job, not a manual one. Paste up to 100 Shorts at a time, let them process in parallel, export the lot to CSV and read them side by side in a spreadsheet. See bulk transcription for how the queue behaves on large jobs.
What you pay
Billing is by the second of source video. A 45-second Short costs 45 seconds of your balance whether it came from a caption track or from speech recognition — no rounding up to a full minute, which is the difference between 300 minutes buying you roughly 400 Shorts and buying you exactly 300.
Ten minutes free to start. Packs are $9 / 300 minutes, $29 / 1,200 minutes and $79 / 4,000 minutes, bought once, never expiring, with no subscription attached. Anything that fails to extract is refunded to your balance item by item.
Known failure modes
Being honest about these saves you a support email:
- Age-restricted and private videos cannot be fetched. They fail cleanly and refund.
- Music-only Shorts return little or nothing, because there is no speech to recognise. That is not a bug, but it does consume the seconds if the audio processes successfully.
- YouTube occasionally rate-limits automated fetching. When that happens items fail rather than hang, and the minutes come back to you.
- Members-only and unlisted-with-restrictions content is out of reach by design.
Try it on your own links
Ten free minutes, no card. Paste a batch of TikTok or YouTube links and read the scripts.
Start extracting →Questions people ask
Can I get the transcript of a YouTube Short that has captions turned off?
Yes. When there is no usable caption track we transcribe the audio with speech recognition instead, so the result comes back either way.
Is this different from copying the transcript from YouTube itself?
YouTube shows a transcript panel for videos that have captions, one video at a time, in the browser. This does a hundred at once, covers videos with no captions at all, and exports the whole batch to CSV with author, duration and engagement attached.
Do Shorts and regular YouTube videos cost the same?
Yes, both bill by the second of video length. A 45-second Short costs 45 seconds; a 12-minute video costs 12 minutes.
What is the longest video I can process?
30 minutes per item. Longer uploads are rejected before they consume any balance.