Use case

Turn a YouTube video into a script you can work with

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

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. Cached for a day, because a published video’s subtitles do not change.

2. YouTube Video Stats/v1/youtube/stats

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

What this does not do

• Only videos where YouTube publishes subtitles. If there are none, you get an availability status rather than invented text, and you are not charged.
• YouTube only. TikTok and Instagram transcripts do not exist upstream, so we do not sell them.
• 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 a live read and nothing on a cache hit. A resource that turns out to be private, deleted, or that we could not reach is never charged, so a sweep over a list of dead links costs you nothing.How billing works →

APIs used

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