Facebook Transcript Scraper: Reels and Videos to Text

Turn public Facebook reels and videos into text, without an account or API key. Paste reel or video links, or a public Page, and each video comes back with its transcript as plain text and as timestamped segments, its language, optional SRT and WebVTT subtitle files, and the video's metadata (Page, date, caption, views, reactions, comments).

Two things you would otherwise check by hand: when the creator added captions to a video, we return them as they are (no speech-to-text, only the transcript fee), but Facebook's automatic captions are not used, because on 10 reels shared on Reddit (12 October 2026) they misheard 5 that our speech-to-text got right; and videos that are only music come back as a free no_speech record instead of a made-up transcript. Every video that cannot be transcribed (deleted, private, not a video) gets a free record that says why. You pay only for transcripts delivered.

What we measured

On the Apify platform on 11 October 2026, with the default settings of that day (Facebook's automatic captions were still used then), on 13 public reels and videos (English, Spanish and Hindi; 32 to 1,052 seconds) taken from Pages and from videos shared at random, in 4 runs:

• 9 transcripts. 6 came from Facebook's own captions (English, Spanish, Hindi; no audio minute billed; a 17-minute video returned 2,703 words), 3 from speech-to-text (a 60-second reel: 57 words; a 2 minute 25 video: 3 minutes billed). In this sample about two videos in three had captions; on an earlier local sample of 10, about one in four. Expect both.
• 4 reels without clear speech (music, ambient sound) came back as free missing records. We checked two of them by hand with a separate transcription: nothing but music.
• A Page without public reels, a Page that does not exist, a deleted video and a post link each came back as a free error record with the reason.
• The default input (one reel) runs in about 6 seconds. A Page with 4 videos took 14 seconds.

Speech-to-text runs on third-party AI providers: OpenAI's Whisper models (large-v3 and large-v3 turbo) run by Groq for most videos, and ElevenLabs Scribe, a stronger model, to settle the language when hints disagree and as a backup. The audio is sent to them only to be transcribed. ElevenLabs stores each transcript on its side: we delete it as soon as we have read it and check that it is gone (we read it again and get "not found"); if a deletion cannot be confirmed before the run ends, the run log says so.

Whisper is known to invent short phrases on music ("Thank you.", "Music", "Bye."). We filter them: a phrase the model is not confident about, a known phantom phrase, or a few words spread over a long stretch of music are not speech. A video whose speech is all filtered out is missing with missingReason: "no_speech", free. We never sell part of a video as its transcript: when the filter has to leave out more than 20% of the speech, the video is missing with missingReason: "incomplete_transcript", free.

What you can transcribe

Input	Examples	What you get
Reels	https://www.facebook.com/reel/636216875539019, /{page}/reel/…	that reel
Videos	https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=…, /{page}/videos/…, /video.php?v=…, /watch/live/?v=…	that video
Short links	https://www.facebook.com/share/r/…, /share/v/…, https://fb.watch/…	the video behind the link
Pages	@SteveBartlettShow, https://www.facebook.com/SteveBartlettShow, …/reels/	the Page's latest reels

Mix them in one run. A video found in two inputs (a link and a Page) is transcribed and charged once.

Pages: without signing in, Facebook shows at most the 10 latest reels of a Page, and some Pages show none (those get a free account_empty record that says so). We read those and transcribe up to maxVideosPerAccount (10 at most). For older videos, paste their links. Personal profiles are not read. Facebook shows only public videos to a visitor who is not signed in: private videos, groups, stories, posts, photos and Marketplace are not supported and come back as free error records.

Languages

Creator captions are returned in the language spoken in the video; the automatic translations Facebook adds to them are ignored. For speech-to-text we use the same language checks as our other transcript Actors: a caption written in another script than the detected language, or a detection that contradicts a strong hint, sends the video to a stronger model that settles the language; if it still cannot be settled, the video comes back as a free uncertain_language record, never as a charged guess, and never as a translation.

language is a preference, never an instruction: it changes neither the models used nor the number of passes, and never forces a translation. A video in English with language: "fr" comes back in English with requestedLanguageFound: false.

Output

One record per video. A transcript (status: "ok"), shortened here:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "platform": "facebook",
  "videoId": "636216875539019",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/reel/636216875539019/",
  "author": {
    "username": "SteveBartlettShow",
    "fullName": "Steven Bartlett",
    "id": "100044966566880",
    "isVerified": true,
    "url": "https://www.facebook.com/SteveBartlettShow"
  },
  "caption": "Feel trapped in life? Watch this …\n\n#podcast",
  "hashtags": ["podcast"],
  "publishedAt": "2025-07-17T13:00:38Z",
  "viewCount": 5986517,
  "reactionCount": 150288,
  "commentCount": 884,
  "durationSeconds": 60.8,
  "language": "en",
  "transcriptSource": "speech_to_text",
  "isAutoGenerated": true,
  "hasSpeech": true,
  "transcript": "Have you ever seen that video of the ant in the pen? No. They get an ant on a piece of paper, and …",
  "segmentCount": 30,
  "wordCount": 259,
  "billedMinutes": 2,
  "input": "https://www.facebook.com/reel/636216875539019",
  "inputType": "video"
}

A video without a transcript comes back as a free record that holds the reason and nothing else:

{
  "status": "missing",
  "platform": "facebook",
  "videoId": "1447510737466246",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/reel/1447510737466246/",
  "missingReason": "no_speech",
  "message": "no clear speech detected (music, sounds, or words the model is not sure of); free",
  "input": "https://www.facebook.com/reel/1447510737466246",
  "inputType": "video"
}

Fields that need a word of explanation

• status: ok (transcript, charged), missing (the video exists but has nothing to transcribe: no_speech, incomplete_transcript, no_audio, or too_long past your limit; free) or error (the link could not be read; free).
• errorCode and retryable: not_found, invalid_url, account_not_found, account_empty are final; blocked, network, transcription_capacity and transcription_failed are worth retrying later (retryable: true).
• transcriptSource: captions (captions the creator added to the video, as Facebook serves them; Facebook's automatic captions are not used) or speech_to_text.
• language: ISO 639-1 code of the language spoken and transcribed. We never translate.
• segments: start, end and duration in seconds. includeSrt and includeVtt add ready-to-save .srt and .vtt files.
• viewCount, reactionCount, commentCount: the counts Facebook shows on the video, exact (not rounded as "1.2M"). Facebook sometimes serves a video in its reels player, which shows no view count: viewCount is then empty.
• billedMinutes: the started minutes of video billed for a speech-to-text transcript (a 36-second reel is 1 minute); 0 for captions.
• input and position: which of your inputs produced the record, and the rank of the video in a Page's list. Records are written as each video finishes: sort by input and position for the source's order.

The dataset has three views: Overview, Transcripts and Video details. For a spreadsheet, export the Transcripts view as Excel (XLSX): one row per video. A CSV opened in Excel may read a caption that starts with =, +, - or @ as a formula: prefer XLSX or JSON. Excel also cuts a cell after 32,767 characters (about 35 minutes of speech). Control characters and text-direction marks are removed from captions and transcripts. The run's summary is the OUTPUT record of the default key-value store: per input, videos, transcripts, missing, errors and duplicates.

Input examples

The latest reels of two Pages and one reel, with subtitle files:

{
  "urls": ["@SteveBartlettShow", "https://www.facebook.com/natgeo", "https://www.facebook.com/reel/636216875539019"],
  "maxVideosPerAccount": 5,
  "includeSrt": true
}

Text only, at most 200 transcripts:

{
  "urls": ["https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=…", "https://fb.watch/…"],
  "transcriptFormat": "text",
  "maxItems": 200
}

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.001 per transcript plus $0.0045 per started minute of video transcribed by speech-to-text, plus a start fee of $0.004 per GB of memory per run ($0.004 at the default 512 MB). A 40-second reel costs $0.0055, a 2-minute video $0.010. A video returned from captions the creator added costs only the $0.001 transcript fee. Videos without speech, incomplete transcripts, deleted or private videos, errors and duplicates are free. Platform usage is included.

Apify plan	Per transcript	Per started minute
Free	$0.001	$0.0045
Bronze	$0.001	$0.0040
Silver	$0.001	$0.0036
Gold and above	$0.001	$0.0034

Your maximum charge per run is never exceeded: the length of each video is read before it is transcribed, and the run stops at the last transcript it can charge and says so in its status. maxItems caps the transcripts of a run: ask for 10, get 10.

Free records are a by-product, not a product: a run stops, and says why, once 100 videos or inputs (an unknown Page counts) plus 2 per transcript have given no transcript, or once 15 minutes of audio plus 2 per billed minute have been transcribed for nothing (music-only reels). maxDurationMinutes (default 30, at most 60) skips longer videos before anything is transcribed. A single video that would cost more than what is left of your maximum charge gets a free over_budget record and the run goes on with cheaper ones.

Use cases

• Content research: what creators and brands in a niche say in their reels, searchable and quotable.
• Repurposing: turn your own reels and videos into captions, blog posts, newsletters and subtitles.
• LLM pipelines: summaries, topic tagging, hooks and scripts analysis on hundreds of videos.
• Accessibility: SRT and VTT files to edit or upload.

Limits

• Public videos only. Private videos, groups, stories, posts and photos are not supported; a video Facebook shows only to signed-in visitors comes back as a free not_found error.
• Pages: the 10 latest reels at most (Facebook's limit without an account); some Pages show none. Personal profiles are not read.
• Speech or music. The speech-to-text service does not return exactly the same text on every pass over the same video; on clear speech the difference does not matter, on music it can. So we keep a margin: a video is charged only when its speech is clear; everything in between comes back as a free no_speech record. Clearly sung lyrics still count as speech. Short or distant speech over loud music may be classed as no_speech.
• Speed. Videos that need speech-to-text take about 3 seconds each on large runs, because our speech-to-text capacity is shared fairly between runs and paced. If it is temporarily used up, the videos that need it get free transcription_capacity records (retryable: true) and the status says when to retry; they never count against your run's limits and never make it fail.
• Longest video: 60 minutes (maxDurationMinutes, 30 by default).
• Connection: keep the default (automatic). If you set your own connection and it refuses everything, the run stops at once with a free record per input and says so.

Memory and speed

512 MB is the default and the best setting: the run waits on speech-to-text, not on memory, and the Actor uses under 100 MB. More memory does not make it faster (the maximum is 1 GB).

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Facebook transcripts? This Actor reads only public videos, the way a visitor who is not signed in sees them, and accepts no Facebook terms on your behalf. In Meta v. Bright Data (N.D. Cal., January 2024) the court found that collecting public data while logged out did not breach Meta's terms; it is a first-instance decision, not binding everywhere. Transcripts reproduce what people say, which may be protected by copyright and may contain personal data: check that your use (research, analysis, quotation, accessibility) is allowed where you are, and handle personal data under the rules that apply to you (GDPR in Europe). We keep nothing after the run; the transcripts ElevenLabs stores are deleted during the run and the deletion is checked (the run log says so if one could not be confirmed).

Do I need a Facebook account or any setup? No. Keep the default connection: its cost is included in the price.

Why is a video "no_speech" when I hear someone? Check OUTPUT.speechFilter for that video: very short or very uncertain speech over music is filtered. If a video with clear speech comes back no_speech, open an issue with the link: we answer within 48 hours.

What happens when Facebook changes something? The Actor runs every day on known videos, so we see a change before you do. A page Facebook refuses is retried automatically, and a run that fails on our side ends as Failed and charges no transcript.