Download any YouTube transcript in two clicks

Every YouTube video with subtitles already contains its own transcript — the full text of everything that is said, minute by minute. YouTube just never hands it to you as a file. You can watch it, but you can't keep it.

That is exactly what Xtrakt fixes. Open a video, click one button, and the complete transcript lands in your downloads as a simple text file. Here is how it works, and what you can do with it.

Two clicks, start to finish

1. Open any YouTube video that has subtitles — most do, including auto-generated ones.
2. The Xtrakt panel appears beside the player, with the transcript already captured. Click .TXT to download the whole thing as a file, or COPY to put the full text straight into your clipboard.

That's it. No account, no upload, no waiting screen. A three-hour podcast becomes a text file in about a second, because the text was already in your browser — Xtrakt just hands it over.

> video: 2 h 48 min — podcast episode
transcript captured — full length
saved: podcast-episode.txt
ready to read, quote, or summarize

Two formats, depending on what you'll do with it

Before you export, you choose how the text should look:

• Plain text — the whole conversation as clean, continuous prose. Best when you want to read it, quote it, or paste it somewhere as one block.
• Timestamped — every line starts with its moment in the video, like [12:04]. Best when you want to find your way back: read the file, spot the interesting part, and you know exactly where to click in the video.

The most popular use: give it to your AI

A video is hard to skim; text is effortless. Once the transcript is a file or sits in your clipboard, you can paste it into your favorite AI assistant and ask for whatever you actually need:

• "Summarize this two-hour interview in ten bullet points."
• "What does the guest say about negotiation? Quote the exact passages."
• "Turn this lecture into study notes with headings."
• "List every book and person mentioned in this conversation."

The AI gets the full conversation, not your half-remembered version of it — and you get the value of a long video in the two minutes it takes to read an answer. The timestamped format works especially well here: when the AI quotes a passage, the timestamp tells you exactly where to verify it in the video.

Everything stays on your computer

One thing worth knowing: the export happens entirely in your browser. The transcript is not sent to any server, there is no account to create, and nothing about your viewing is collected. The file goes from your browser tab to your downloads folder, and nowhere else. Xtrakt is free and open source — what you do with your transcripts is your business.

The honest fine print

• The video needs subtitles. No subtitle track means no transcript to export. The vast majority of videos have at least auto-generated ones.
• Quality follows the subtitles. Auto-generated captions sometimes mishear names or technical terms; the export faithfully reproduces what YouTube's captions say, including their mistakes.

Try it on the longest video in your watch-later list: press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F on any video, or just click the Xtrakt panel — the transcript is already waiting.