TikTok Transcript Scraper · captions + AI fallback

Paste TikTok video links — get the full spoken text. No API key, no login, no video download on the caption path.

Most spoken-word TikToks already carry TikTok's own auto-generated captions. This Actor reads them directly (two small requests per video, fast and cheap). When a video has no captions — music-only clips, some regions, some creators — it transcribes the audio with Whisper large-v3-turbo instead, so you still get text. Every result passes a quality gate: empty, truncated or garbage transcripts are reported as failures and never charged.

Why this one

	This Actor	Caption-only scrapers	AI-only transcribers
Videos with TikTok captions	✅ $0.002	✅ ~$0.001	✅ $0.03+
Videos without captions	✅ AI fallback	❌ nothing	✅
Quality gate (no charge for junk)	✅	–	–
API key needed	no	no	usually

Output

{
  "platform": "tiktok",
  "id": "7307726351291960622",
  "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@renreports/video/7307726351291960622",
  "title": "Influencer media kits - mistakes and steps to make one…",
  "author": "renreports",
  "duration": 139,
  "uploadDate": "20231201",
  "viewCount": 123456,
  "language": "eng-US",
  "source": "caption:tiktok-asr",
  "charCount": 2819,
  "aiMinutes": 0,
  "transcript": "I work in influencer marketing and I look at media kits all day long…"
}

source tells you where the text came from: caption:tiktok-asr (TikTok's own captions), caption:manual / caption:auto (other platforms) or ai:groq-whisper-turbo.

Pricing (pay per event)

• Caption transcript — charged when TikTok already has captions for the video.
• AI transcript + AI minute — charged only when AI transcription succeeds; minutes are counted per started minute of audio.
• Bring your own Groq key (optional) — pay only the small per-result fee on the AI path, no per-minute charge. Free keys at console.groq.com.

Set Max minutes per video to cap cost on long videos (default 30). Turn AI transcription off to pay for captions only.

Input

Field	Description
videoUrls	TikTok video links (full or vm.tiktok.com short links); other platforms also accepted
aiTranscription	Use AI when TikTok has no captions (default on)
languageHint	Spoken language code for the AI path (e.g. en, zh, vi)
maxMinutes	Skip AI for videos longer than this
groqApiKey	Optional: your own key (cheaper AI path)
preferredLanguages	Caption track priority when TikTok offers several

Who uses this

• Trend & competitor research: turn viral TikToks into searchable text
• Feeding RAG, summarization and LLM pipelines with clean transcripts
• Subtitling, translation, accessibility
• Brand & social listening at scale

Notes

TikTok occasionally blocks datacenter IPs for some videos — keep Apify Proxy enabled (default); the Actor retries through a second exit automatically. Failures are classified (proxy / rate-limit / blocked / network / other) in the run report so you can see why something failed, not just that it did. Profile pages are not expanded (one video per URL) to keep runs predictable and cheap.