Instagram Reel Transcript Scraper: Text & SRT Subtitles

Instagram Reel Transcript - Transcribe Instagram Videos to Text, SRT & Captions

Paste Instagram Reel links and get back what is actually said in each reel as clean text, plus SRT subtitles, timestamped segments, the caption, and the post's views, likes, comments and creator. It transcribes the reel's audio with Whisper, so it works on any reel with speech, even when the creator never added captions. No Instagram login, no cookies, no API key.

What people use it for

• Content research: read the scripts of a creator's best reels without watching them one by one.
• Repurposing: turn your own reels into blog posts, threads, newsletters or YouTube descriptions.
• Subtitles: get an SRT file to burn in or upload alongside the video.
• Ad and trend analysis: collect hooks and talking points across many reels into one sheet.
• AI pipelines: feed reel transcripts into a summariser, classifier or RAG index.

Input

{
  "reelUrls": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdpAtTHkvgk/",
    "DXuciRbjX2O"
  ],
  "language": "",
  "format": "both"
}

• reelUrls: reel or video-post links (/reel/, /reels/, /p/) or just the shortcodes.
• language: leave empty to auto-detect, or set an ISO code such as en, es, pt, hi.
• format: both (text + segments + SRT), text, or segments.
• translateToEnglish: return the speech translated into English.
• maxReels (default 50) and maxDurationMinutes (default 15) cap what one run can spend.

An empty input {} runs the NatGeo example reel.

Output

One row per reel:

{
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdpAtTHkvgk/",
  "shortcode": "DdpAtTHkvgk",
  "ownerUsername": "natgeo",
  "ownerVerified": true,
  "caption": "It's not possible to accelerate faster than the speed of light, but th…",
  "viewCount": 282934,
  "likeCount": 21634,
  "commentCount": 186,
  "productType": "clips",
  "ok": true,
  "durationSeconds": 39.06,
  "language": "en",
  "languageProbability": 0.9994,
  "wordCount": 121,
  "text": "You can't speed up and accelerate faster than the speed of light. But there are backdoor ways…",
  "segments": [{ "start": 0.0, "end": 3.36, "text": "You can't speed up and accelerate faster than the speed of light." }],
  "srt": "1\n00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,360\nYou can't speed up…",
  "charged": true
}

Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel. A reel with no speech (music only) still returns its caption and stats, with charged: false.

Use it from code, n8n, Make or an AI agent

• API: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/eliai~instagram-reel-transcript/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN with the input above as the JSON body returns the rows directly.
• No-code: Apify's n8n, Make and Zapier integrations run it as one step.
• AI agents: Apify's MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com) exposes it as a tool, so an agent can read a reel it was handed.

Example

A real run on 2026-10-31 with the input this page's form is prefilled with:

{
  "reelUrls": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdpAtTHkvgk/"
  ]
}

It finished in 39 seconds and returned 1 result. It was charged for 1 reel-transcribed event ($0.015 on the Free plan). Each result has these fields (values are not shown here because they include people's names or contact details):

Field	Type
url	string
input	string
shortcode	string
ownerUsername	string
ownerFullName	null
ownerVerified	boolean
ownerFollowers	number
caption	string
viewCount	number
likeCount	number
commentCount	number
postedAt	null
productType	string
ok	boolean
durationSeconds	number
transcribedSeconds	number
truncated	boolean
language	string
languageProbability	number
wordCount	number
tookMs	number
text	string
segments	array
srt	string
charged	boolean

Pricing

$0.015 per reel with speech. That covers reels up to 3 minutes, which is almost all of them; longer videos add $0.015 per extra started minute. Never charged: private, deleted or age-restricted posts, photo posts, reels with no speech, partial transcripts, and any failure. Apify platform usage is included.

Limits

• Only public reels. Private accounts and age-restricted posts return a clear error row, free.
• The transcript is machine speech recognition (Whisper small). Clear speech is very accurate; heavy music, crosstalk or strong accents lower accuracy, and languageProbability tells you how sure it was about the language.
• Reels are processed one after another.
• It reads a reel's public data at the moment you run it; view and like counts change over time.

FAQ

Do I need an Instagram account or cookies? No. It reads the same public data Instagram shows logged-out visitors.

Does it use the creator's captions? It transcribes the audio itself, so it works whether or not the creator added captions, and it also returns the written caption separately.

Can I paste a profile link? Not yet. Paste reel links; one profile's reels can be collected with any Instagram profile scraper and fed in.

What languages? Whisper auto-detects about 100 languages. Set language if detection guesses wrong on a short clip.

Changelog

• 2026-11-01: Page text only: a clearer page heading, an Example section from a real run and dropped an unmeasured speed claim. Code, output and price are unchanged.
• 2026-10-05: Price per transcribed reel halved to $0.015 on the Free plan (lower on paid Apify plans). Same output.
• 0.1 (2026-09-25): first release: reel links or shortcodes in; transcript, SRT, segments, caption and post stats out; per-reel pricing that never charges for silence or failures.

Who uses it

• Content repurposers turning spoken reels into blog posts, threads and captions
• Social teams searching competitor reels for what was actually said
• Accessibility teams adding SRT subtitles to reels
• Researchers coding the spoken content of reels by creator or topic
• Developers and AI agents that need reel speech as plain text through an API call