YouTube AI Transcript Extractor (Speech-to-Text & Timestamps)

Extract complete, structured transcripts from YouTube video and Shorts URLs using high-performance AI speech-to-text. This Actor reverse-engineers advanced Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) pipelines to process video audio tracks, returning clean sentence-level paragraphs with exact millisecond timestamps.

Perfect for content repurposing, video summarization, automatic captioning/subtitles, social media monitoring, SEO search indexing, and LLM-ready text processing.

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⚡ Key Features

1. High-Fidelity AI Transcription: Decodes audio tracks and converts spoken words into highly accurate text. Automatically detects spoken languages (English, Spanish, French, German, etc.).

2. Sentence-Level Timestamps: Splits transcripts into natural sentences with exact start times (start_time_ms), end times (end_time_ms), and calculated durations (duration_seconds) so you can align captions instantly.

3. Enterprise Reliability: Bypasses YouTube WAF challenge screens, stream restrictions, and network blocks.

4. Clean JSON Format: Filters out large, redundant trace files to present a structured payload containing only the metadata, title, duration, and transcript arrays.

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📥 Input Parameter Schema

• url (string, required): The target YouTube video or Shorts URL to transcribe (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/amMvXqzXB38).

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📤 Output Dataset Example (JSON)

When execution completes, each record is saved to the default Apify Dataset in the following format:

{
  "status": "success",
  "video_title": "What is the best love advice you've ever heard? #podcast #jayshetty #relationship",
  "duration": 7,
  "language": "en",
  "transcription": {
    "full_text": "What is the best love advice you've ever heard or received? No one is perfect. Figure out what you can tolerate and what you can't tolerate.",
    "sentences": [
      {
        "text": "What is the best love advice you've ever heard or received?",
        "start_time_ms": 0,
        "end_time_ms": 3620,
        "duration_ms": 3620,
        "duration_seconds": 3.62
      },
      {
        "text": "No one is perfect.",
        "start_time_ms": 3620,
        "end_time_ms": 4860,
        "duration_ms": 1240,
        "duration_seconds": 1.24
      },
      {
        "text": "Figure out what you can tolerate and what you can't tolerate.",
        "start_time_ms": 4860,
        "end_time_ms": 7460,
        "duration_ms": 2600,
        "duration_seconds": 2.6
      }
    ]
  }
}

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q1: How long does the transcription process take? A1: The extraction and AI speech-to-text transcription process typically takes between 30 to 90 seconds, depending on the video's length and current server load.

Q2: How does the API prevent connection timeouts? A2: We use an HTTP connection keep-alive streaming system. The API immediately returns a 200 OK status and streams space characters ( ) every 3 seconds to keep the socket alive. Once transcription finishes, the clean JSON payload is outputted at the end of the stream. Standard JSON parsers automatically ignore leading whitespace.

Q3: Does the API support multiple languages? A3: Yes! The ASR transcription engine automatically detects the language spoken in the video (English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, etc.) and processes it with high accuracy.

Q4: Do I need personal credentials or YouTube cookies to run searches? A4: No. The API operates fully autonomously. It bypasses WAF blocks and handles YouTube stream retrieval internally, requiring only a video URL.

Q5: Can I paginate or request specific segments? A5: The API returns the full transcript segmented into individual sentences with exact timestamps, allowing you to easily index or slice specific segments on your client side.

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🏷️ Keywords:

youtube transcript api, youtube subtitles scraper, video audio transcriber, youtube caption downloader, speech to text api, social video text extractor, content repurposing tool, podcast transcription api, youtube shorts transcriber.