YouTube Transcript for AI Agents

Give your agent the words of a YouTube video. This actor turns public YouTube URLs into transcripts with timestamps, ready to paste into an LLM: built for AI agents, and one call away from Claude and other agents through the Apify MCP server.

What it does

Send up to 100 single video URLs per run. For each video you get one dataset item:

• videoId, title and lang (the language of the captions used).
• segments: the transcript as { start, end, text } in seconds.
• text: the whole transcript as one string.
• frameskimUrl: a link to Frameskim, the sister actor for frames, screenshots and moments of the same videos.

A video that has no captions, or that YouTube blocks, becomes an item with videoId and error and is not charged. If YouTube blocks the video's metadata but the transcript is available, title is an empty string.

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription. Apify bills each event and never more than the spending limit you set for the run.

Event	Price (USD)	When
transcript	$0.01	Per transcript delivered

What fails is not charged: a video without a transcript, a blocked video, a video that takes too long and every video left after a stop (see Limits) cost nothing. If every video fails, the run ends with the reason and "Nothing was charged."

Examples

Input:

{ "urls": ["https://youtu.be/fWjsdhR3z3c", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg"], "lang": "en" }

Output (one item per video, values shortened):

{ "videoId": "fWjsdhR3z3c", "title": "...", "lang": "en", "segments": [{ "start": 0.0, "end": 4.2, "text": "..." }], "text": "...", "frameskimUrl": "https://apify.com/emttn/frameskim" }

A video that failed:

{ "videoId": "abc123def45", "error": "..." }

Use it by API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/emttn~youtube-transcript/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://youtu.be/fWjsdhR3z3c"]}'

Use it from Claude (MCP)

Add the Apify MCP server with this actor as a tool:

{ "mcpServers": { "apify": { "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=emttn/youtube-transcript" } } }

Then ask, for example: "Use YouTube Transcript to read this video and summarize it."

The tool starts a run and returns its status; the agent then reads the results with the server's get-dataset-items tool.

Limits

• Single public videos only: no channels, playlists or searches. More than 100 URLs, or any URL that is not a single video, is refused before anything is processed, with nothing charged.
• Videos are processed one after the other. A video that takes longer than 120 s is reported as failed and not charged; the batch stops after 55 minutes.
• The batch stops after 5 failures in a row, or when what the failed videos cost us exceeds 30% of what was charged for the delivered ones plus 0.01 USD. The videos left become error items ("Stopped: ..."), nothing is charged for them, and the run still ends as succeeded with what was delivered.
• Each run respects your Apify spending limit: when it does not cover one more transcript, the batch stops and the rest are error items, not charged.
• Duplicate URLs (the same video twice, in any URL form) are deduplicated: the video is processed once and charged once.
• lang applies to the whole batch; there is no per-video language.
• Videos need captions: this actor does not transcribe audio.

FAQ

Which languages? Any language the video has captions in; set lang (default en) and the actor falls back to the original language. When the video has no manual track in the requested language, YouTube's automatic translation of its captions may be returned instead; the lang field of each item says which language you got.

What if a run fails? The status message says why. A run that cannot start says "Nothing was charged."; a run that stops unexpectedly says "Only delivered transcripts were charged." and charges only the transcripts it delivered, if any. Retry later if YouTube blocked the request.

Do you keep my transcripts? No. They live only in your run's own Apify storage, with your plan's retention.

Frames, screenshots or the moments that answer a question? Use Frameskim.

Legal

Not affiliated with YouTube or Google. By running this actor you confirm you have the right to process each video you submit.

Takedown requests: open an issue in the Issues tab of this page or write to support@frameskim.dev. Blocked videos and channels are refused on the next run.

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