TikTok Transcript Scraper — TikTok video to text, SRT & bulk

Turn public TikTok videos into transcripts, timestamps, SRT and VTT — including the ones TikTok never captioned.

Paste TikTok links, get the words back. Every video returns plain text, timestamped segments, a ready-to-use .srt subtitle file, a .vtt file, and the source metadata: creator, caption, hashtags, duration, language, view count.

Most TikTok transcript tools only read TikTok's own caption track, so they hand back nothing for the majority of TikToks — the ones where the creator turned captions off, or TikTok never generated them. This Actor falls back to Whisper speech-to-text and transcribes the audio instead.

• No API key, no login, no cookies. Public videos only.
• 90+ languages. The transcript comes back in the video's own language by default.
• Bulk-safe. One dead link never breaks the rest of the run.
• You only pay for delivered transcripts. Failures, private videos and over-length videos are free.

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What it handles

Input	Supported
tiktok.com/@user/video/1234567890123456789	✅
vm.tiktok.com/… and tiktok.com/t/… share links	✅ (followed to the real video)
tiktok.com/embed/v2/… embed URLs	✅
m.tiktok.com/… mobile links	✅
Photo-mode posts	✅ when they carry audio
Profile, hashtag or search URLs	❌ — these are not single videos and return INVALID_URL
Private, friends-only, deleted or region-locked videos	❌ — returned as an error row, uncharged

Other platforms return a clear error pointing you at Short Video Transcriber, which handles TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels in one run.

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Captions vs Whisper — the part that matters

TikTok publishes caption tracks for only some videos, and it says why when it does not: the creator disabled them, TikTok's own speech recognition never ran, or it ran and found no speech in a supported language.

1. Native captions first. When TikTok has a usable track, the words come from it. Fast, and priced at $0.002.
2. Whisper when there are none. The audio is downloaded and transcribed locally with faster-whisper. Priced at $0.040, because it costs roughly a second of CPU per 1.5 seconds of audio.

Where TikTok offers several tracks — its speech recognition of the original audio plus machine translations of that into other languages — the original language is chosen, because a translation of what was said is not a transcript of it. Ask for a specific language and you get that track instead, translation or not.

Exactly one of those two events is charged per video, after the row is written. Never both, never before. A video that fails is not charged at all.

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What you get

One dataset row per input URL:

{
  "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@shanehryhorec/video/7674894968963534100",
  "platform": "tiktok",
  "videoId": "7674894968963534100",
  "author": "shanehryhorec",
  "authorName": "Shane Hryhorec",
  "title": "Kicked off a Virgin Australia plane today. ✈️♿️",
  "hashtags": ["accessibility", "wheelchair", "travel"],
  "durationSeconds": 179.0,
  "language": "en",
  "source": "native_captions",
  "sourceDetail": "tiktok_auto_captions",
  "isAutoGenerated": true,
  "text": "I was kicked off a Virgin Australia flight today…",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 0.08, "end": 2.14, "text": "I was kicked off a Virgin Australia" },
    { "start": 2.14, "end": 4.46, "text": "flight today, and here is what happened" }
  ],
  "srt": "1\n00:00:00,080 --> 00:00:02,140\nI was kicked off a Virgin Australia\n\n2\n…",
  "vtt": "WEBVTT\n\n00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:02.140\nI was kicked off a Virgin Australia\n\n…",
  "wordCount": 695,
  "segmentCount": 118,
  "viewCount": 1840231,
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-14T10:03:11+00:00",
  "status": "ok",
  "error": null
}

source is always exactly one of:

• native_captions — the words came from TikTok's own caption track.
• whisper_asr — the video had no usable captions, so the audio was transcribed with Whisper.

The srt and vtt fields are complete, valid subtitle files. Overlapping cues from auto-generated tracks are trimmed, so subtitles do not double up on screen.

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Pricing

Event	Price	When it fires
caption_transcript	$0.002	A transcript came from TikTok's native captions.
asr_transcript	$0.040	A transcript came from Whisper because there were no captions.
apify-actor-start	$0.00005	Apify's standard start event, charged once per gigabyte of the run's memory. This Actor runs at 2 GB, so $0.0001 per run.

Those are the Free-plan prices. Apify's paid plans get the standard Store discount off every event — Bronze 5 %, Silver 10 %, Gold and above 15 % — so asr_transcript costs $0.038, $0.036 or $0.034 on those plans and caption_transcript costs $0.0019, $0.0018 or $0.0017.

What a run actually costs

Caption availability is what moves the bill, and on TikTok it is lower than on YouTube: dance, music, meme and lifestyle content is mostly caption-less, while talking-head, storytime, educational and news content is largely captioned.

1,000 TikToks	Cost
All have captions	$2.00
50 % captions / 50 % Whisper	$21.00
25 % captions / 75 % Whisper	$30.50
None have captions	$40.00

(Free-plan prices; a Gold plan pays 15 % less than each of these.)

Turn "Transcribe with Whisper when a TikTok has no captions" off to cap the price at $0.002 per video: caption-less videos then return a CAPTIONS_UNAVAILABLE error, free of charge, and you decide what to do with them.

Nothing else is charged. In particular you are not charged for:

• videos that are deleted, private, friends-only or region-locked;
• videos longer than your maxDurationSeconds cap;
• caption-less videos longer than maxAsrDurationSeconds (they return ASR_DURATION_EXCEEDED);
• videos where Whisper finds no speech at all (music-only clips);
• profile URLs, malformed URLs or links from other platforms;
• any run that fails.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	What it does
videoUrls	array	—	Required. TikTok video URLs, one per line. Share links work.
language	string	(blank)	Two-letter code (en, es, pt, ru…). Blank keeps the video's own language — usually what you want. Setting it selects that language's caption track when TikTok offers one (which may be a machine translation) and tells Whisper what to expect.
allowWhisperFallback	boolean	true	Off = captions only, and caption-less videos cost nothing.
maxDurationSeconds	integer	600	Videos longer than this are skipped, free. Max 1200.
maxAsrDurationSeconds	integer	180	Length limit for the Whisper path only. Caption-less videos longer than this return ASR_DURATION_EXCEEDED, free. Captioned videos are unaffected.
maxVideos	integer	1000	Safety cap on the number of URLs processed.
forceWhisper	boolean	false	Advanced. Transcribe with Whisper even when TikTok has captions. Charged at the asr_transcript rate — 20× the caption price.
whisperModel	string	base	tiny, base or small. Only affects the Whisper fallback.
beamSize	integer	1	Whisper decoding beam width.
concurrency	integer	5	Videos resolved in parallel. Whisper always runs one at a time.
includeFailedItems	boolean	true	Keep a row (with an error code) for every failure, so inputs reconcile to outputs.
useResidentialFallback	boolean	true	Retries a request through a residential IP when TikTok answers the normal proxy with a bot check. Rarely used — TikTok serves datacenter IPs fine.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy	Recommended. The run pins one proxy session, which is what TikTok's media CDN requires.

Minimal input

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.tiktok.com/@shanehryhorec/video/7674894968963534100",
    "https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMabcdefg/"
  ]
}

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Run it

In the Apify Console

Open the Actor, paste your links into TikTok video URLs, one per line, and click Start. Results appear in the dataset and export as JSON, CSV, XLSX or Excel — or download the srt column straight into subtitle files.

API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/sauliusautomatesit~tiktok-transcript-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "videoUrls": [
          "https://www.tiktok.com/@shanehryhorec/video/7674894968963534100"
        ],
        "allowWhisperFallback": true
      }'

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("sauliusautomatesit/tiktok-transcript-scraper").call(input={
    "videoUrls": [
        "https://www.tiktok.com/@shanehryhorec/video/7674894968963534100",
        "https://www.tiktok.com/@pabloescabor.08/video/7675011438385057040",
    ],
    "allowWhisperFallback": True,
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item["status"] != "ok":
        print(f"{item['inputUrl']}: {item['error']} — {item['errorMessage']}")
        continue
    print(item["author"], item["language"], item["wordCount"], "words", f"({item['source']})")
    with open(f"{item['videoId']}.srt", "w", encoding="utf-8") as handle:
        handle.write(item["srt"])

JavaScript

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('sauliusautomatesit/tiktok-transcript-scraper').call({
    videoUrls: [
        'https://www.tiktok.com/@shanehryhorec/video/7674894968963534100',
    ],
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

for (const item of items) {
    if (item.status !== 'ok') {
        console.warn(`${item.inputUrl}: ${item.error}`);
        continue;
    }
    console.log(`@${item.author} (${item.source}): ${item.text}`);
    // await fs.writeFile(`${item.videoId}.srt`, item.srt);
}

n8n, Make and Zapier

Works with the standard Apify → Run Actor node in n8n and the Apify → Run an Actor module in Make. Point the node at this Actor, pass videoUrls as the input JSON, then read the dataset items in the next step — text for the transcript, srt for a subtitle file, error to branch on failures.

A common shape: a sheet or webhook supplies TikTok links → this Actor returns transcripts → an LLM node summarises, tags or repurposes them → the result is written back. Because failures come back as rows with an error field rather than as a broken run, a filter on status == "ok" is all the error handling most workflows need.

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Errors

Failed videos get a dataset row with status: "error", an error code and a plain-English errorMessage. They are never charged.

Code	Meaning
VIDEO_UNAVAILABLE	Deleted, never existed, or region-locked.
VIDEO_PRIVATE	Private, friends-only or followers-only.
DURATION_EXCEEDED	Longer than maxDurationSeconds.
ASR_DURATION_EXCEEDED	No captions, and longer than maxAsrDurationSeconds. Raise that limit to transcribe it anyway.
CAPTIONS_UNAVAILABLE	No native captions and the Whisper fallback is turned off.
NO_SPEECH_DETECTED	Whisper found no speech — a music-only or silent video.
INVALID_URL	Not a link to a single TikTok video — a profile, hashtag or search URL, for example.
PLATFORM_NOT_ENABLED	A YouTube or other non-TikTok URL. Use Short Video Transcriber for those.
MEDIA_UNAVAILABLE	The audio could not be downloaded for transcription.
BLOCKED / RATE_LIMITED	TikTok refused the request. Try again, ideally with a proxy.
MEMORY_LIMIT	The video does not fit in the run's memory for the chosen model. Raise the memory or pick a smaller model.

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Limits and good to know

• Public videos only. No login, no cookies, no private or followers-only content, and no way to add any — that is a deliberate design choice, not a missing feature.
• Not every video can be transcribed. A deleted, private or region-locked video fails, and a video that is pure music with no speech legitimately returns NO_SPEECH_DETECTED. You are not charged for either.
• Memory. Run with at least 2 GB. That covers the whole duration range with the base model; the Actor refuses an impossible combination up front instead of being killed mid-run.
• TikTok's auto-captions are auto-captions. When a transcript comes from TikTok's own ASR track (isAutoGenerated: true), it carries that track's mistakes, and on music-heavy videos it can be very sparse. For maximum accuracy on a specific video, switch forceWhisper on — and accept the asr_transcript price — or raise whisperModel to small.
• Caption availability changes. TikTok backfills captions hours after upload, so the same video can take the Whisper path today and the caption path tomorrow.
• Whisper is length-limited; captions are not. A caption-less video is transcribed up to maxAsrDurationSeconds (180 s by default, which covers the overwhelming majority of TikToks). Past that, Whisper's cost outgrows a per-video price, so the video returns ASR_DURATION_EXCEEDED and costs you nothing. Raise the limit if you want those anyway. Videos with captions run to the full maxDurationSeconds at the $0.002 rate, whatever their length.
• One URL per video. This Actor does not crawl profiles or hashtags to find videos for you.

What this Actor does not do

It transcribes videos. It does not scrape comments, followers or profile analytics, does not monitor accounts, and does not summarise, translate or score sentiment — pipe the transcript into an LLM step for that.

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Related searches

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