How to Get a YouTube Transcript on Desktop and Phone

#a11y #productivity #tutorial #youtube

Open Show transcript under a YouTube video, copy the text, and see what to do when the button is missing or the captions are wrong.

URL: https://freelivecaption.com/en/posts/youtube-transcript
Published: 2026-10-13
Updated: 2026-10-13
Author: Jonas Weber (https://freelivecaption.com/en/about)
Topic: Videos (https://freelivecaption.com/en/topics/video)

Summary

On a computer, expand the description under the video, click Show transcript, then select and copy the text.
The button only appears for videos that have captions. Automatic captions can be missing for new uploads, unsupported languages or poor audio.
YouTube's help page gives no separate phone steps. TechSmith suggests opening the desktop site in your phone's browser.
For a video with no captions, use live captions on your device, such as Chrome Live Caption or Live Captions on a Mac.

Open the transcript on a computer

Open the video on youtube.com and click more in the description box under the player to expand it.
Click Show transcript. A panel opens with the captions line by line and scrolls along as the video plays.
Click any line to jump to that point in the video.

YouTube's View video transcripts page says this works for any video that has captions. It adds that the panel can also help you find chapters and the people and places mentioned in the video.

Copy the text

Highlight the lines you want in the panel, then press Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on a Mac) or right-click and choose Copy. For the whole transcript, scroll to the end and drag from the first line to the last. Paste it into a Google Doc, a Word file or a plain text file. To study a line you did not understand, see our guide to saving a sentence with audio and translation in Anki.

The timestamps come along with the text. TechSmith's guide to getting a YouTube transcript shows the same copy steps and says you can delete the timestamps from the pasted text if you don't want them. If you want the text as a subtitle file, our guide to turning a transcript into an SRT file covers how.

YouTube's transcript page mentions no download button, so for someone else's video, pasting into a file is how you save the text. If you want to use that text to study a language, our guide to repeating clips aloud with a transcript shows one routine.

Download captions from your own video

If the video is on your channel, YouTube Studio can give you the caption file. YouTube's Edit or remove captions page lists the steps:

Sign in to YouTube Studio and select Subtitles from the left menu.
Click the video.
Under Subtitles, click Edit next to the language you want.
Click Options, then Download subtitles.

Your browser saves a file with that caption track in it. The page only covers your own videos and says nothing about downloading captions from anyone else's.

On a phone or tablet

YouTube's transcript page gives one step, Show transcript in the video description, and no separate steps for Android, iPhone or iPad. TechSmith tells phone users to switch the browser to the desktop version of YouTube and then follow the computer steps above. The same guide says mobile devices can't download the transcript, so on a phone you can read it and copy from it, not save it as a file.

Browsers name the switch differently. Look in the browser's menu for a desktop-site entry.

If Show transcript is missing

TechSmith's guide says the button doesn't appear when transcripts are disabled for a video, and then YouTube's own interface has no transcript to give you. Check these in order:

Click more first. The button sits inside the description box, and it isn't visible until the description is expanded.
Look at when the video went up. YouTube's automatic captioning page says captions may not be ready yet because the audio is complex to process. Come back later.
Listen to the audio. The same page lists why automatic captions don't appear: an unsupported language, a video that's too long, poor sound quality or speech YouTube doesn't recognize, a long silence at the start, and overlapping speakers or several languages at once. A viewer can't change any of those on someone else's video.
If none of that fits and the button is still gone, the video has no captions. Go to the last section below.

If the transcript opens but is in the wrong language, or translated captions won't load, our YouTube auto-translate fix covers that.

Automatic captions and creator captions

YouTube generates automatic captions with speech recognition and publishes them on the video when they're available. Its page says they can misrepresent the speech because of mispronunciations, accents, dialects or background noise, and it tells creators to review and edit them. Automatic captions are offered in more than 100 languages, so compare the speaker's language with the list on that page.

Creators can also add captions themselves. YouTube's page on adding subtitles and captions names four ways: uploading a file, auto-sync, typing them in, and auto-translate.

The transcript panel shows whichever captions the video has, so check names, numbers and technical terms against the audio before you quote it.

Videos with no captions

With no transcript to open, live captions on your own device can caption the audio as it plays. In Chrome, use Live Caption, covered in our Chrome Live Caption guide. On a Mac, Live Captions is built into the system, and our Live Captions on Mac fix guide helps if it won't start. Live captions on every device lists what else is available. These show text while the video plays and don't add a transcript to the YouTube page.

Vocena, the app we make, can also caption audio that other apps play, such as a video or a podcast. Its live captions are free with no time limit, and the current session is saved to its library. The Mac app needs macOS 15.5 or later and can caption other apps' audio. On iPhone, that needs a physical device running iOS 27. The iPhone and iPad app otherwise needs iOS or iPadOS 26 or later. For podcasts on Spotify, our guide to finding Spotify episode transcripts covers where to look.