Use case

Turn a YouTube video into a script

Pull the public transcript of a YouTube video with timed segments, for repurposing, research, search indexing or feeding an agent a narrow tool.

Paste one video link in the browser tool and copy the text, with timestamps if you want them. Use the API to run it from your own code.

1. 0:00Today we are pulling a shot on a manual lever machine.
2. 0:04Eighteen grams in the basket, levelled, tamped once.
3. 0:11Lock it in, lift the lever, and let the pre-infusion run.
4. 0:19Now press down slowly. You want about thirty seconds.

The problem

The useful part of a video is what was said, and it is locked in a player. Scraping the page for it means maintaining a parser against a site that changes, and handing an agent a whole browser when all it needed was text.

How it works

1. YouTube Transcript /v1/youtube/transcript

   The joined transcript plus every timed segment with text, start and duration.

2. YouTube Video Stats /v1/youtube/stats

   Title, view and like counts, so a repurposing queue can be ordered by what performed best.

What this does not do

• Only videos where YouTube publishes subtitles. If there are none, you get an availability status rather than invented text. That lookup is charged like any other.
• YouTube only. Sourcevine does not currently offer TikTok or Instagram transcript APIs.
• No summary, translation or rewrite. This returns the transcript; what you do with it is your job.
• Auto-generated captions carry the platform’s own transcription errors. The response says whether they were auto-generated.

Billing

Each step above costs that API's credit price on every call, including a link that turns out to be deleted or private. A read we could not complete is never charged, and a dead link comes back as a typed status rather than a stale number. How billing works →

APIs used

Try the browser tools

All use cases →