🎤 TED Talk Transcript Scraper — TXT, SRT, VTT

Get any TED Talk's transcript instantly — no login, no AI transcription. TED publishes a transcript for every talk in dozens of languages, and this actor reads it straight from TED's own API: full text, timestamped segments, and ready-to-use SRT/VTT — plus the speaker, view count, topics, and TED's AI takeaway. Point it at talk URLs or a whole TED topic/speaker page.

Because the transcript already exists, there's no speech-to-text compute — it's fast and cheap.

---

What does it do?

For each TED talk you give it (by URL or harvested from a TED page), it returns:

• 📝 Full transcript (plain text) — always included
• ⏲️ Timestamped segments — {start, end, text}
• 🎬 SRT / VTT subtitles — ready for any editor
• 🎤 Speaker, duration, view count, recorded/published dates
• 🏷️ Topics + 💡 TED's AI takeaway headline
• 🌍 Any available language

No ASR, no API key — it reads TED's published transcript.

---

What data does it extract?

For every talk:

• 🆔 talk_id, slug, 🔗 url, 🏷️ title
• 🎤 speaker, ⏱️ duration_sec, 👁️ views, 📅 recorded_on, published_at
• 🏷️ topics[], 💡 takeaway_headline, 📝 description
• 🌍 language, 📄 transcript, ⏲️ segments[], 🎬 srt, vtt, segment_count
• ✨ is_new (monitor), 🕒 scraped_at

---

Who is it for?

• ✍️ Writers & content teams repurposing talks into articles, quotes, and summaries.
• 🤖 AI / RAG dataset builders assembling clean, multilingual speech text.
• 🔎 Researchers & educators searching talk content and citing passages.
• 🌍 Localization teams pulling transcripts across languages.

---

How to use it (step by step)

1. Click Try for free.
2. Paste one or more talk URLs (e.g. https://www.ted.com/talks/{slug}) — or a TED topic/speaker page URL.
3. (Optional) set a language and extra formats (srt, vtt, segments).
4. Click Start, then open the Dataset tab to view/export.
5. (Optional) set monitorMode + a pageUrl + a Schedule to capture new talks automatically.

Quick start

{ "talkUrls": ["https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready"], "transcriptFormats": ["txt", "srt"] }

---

Input

Field	What it does
talkUrls	TED talk URLs / slugs
pageUrl	a TED topic/speaker/playlist page to harvest talk links from
language	transcript language code (default en)
transcriptFormats	txt · segments · srt · vtt
includeTakeaways	add topics, description, and TED's AI takeaway
maxTalks	hard cap per run (0 = unlimited)
monitorMode, alertOnNewTalk	recurring new-talk watcher + alerts
webhookUrl, slackWebhookUrl, emailRecipients	alert channels
proxyConfiguration, requestConcurrency	proxy + parallelism

---

Output

Each talk is one dataset record (fields above). Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS, or fetch via the Apify API.

---

How much does it cost?

Pay-per-event — and with no transcription compute, it's cheap:

Event	What it covers	Suggested price
lot-scraped	each talk returned	~$0.003 / talk
lot-detail-enriched	each transcript fetched	~$0.003 / talk
monitor-run-completed	each scheduled watch run	~$0.05 / run
new-lot-detected	each new talk	~$0.02 / talk
alert-delivered	each Slack/email/webhook push	~$0.005 / alert

(Final per-event prices are set on the actor's pricing page.)

---

How does it work without AI transcription?

TED publishes a human/edited transcript for each talk, in many languages, and exposes it through a public API. This actor reads that existing transcript — it does not run speech-to-text, so there's no GPU/compute cost and results are instant.

---

Is it legal to scrape TED transcripts?

TED talks and their transcripts are published publicly, and TED talks are generally released under a Creative Commons (BY–NC–ND) license. The output is talk content and public stats, not personal data. Scraping public data is generally legal, but you are responsible for your use — review TED's Terms of Service and the talks' Creative Commons license, and attribute/limit redistribution accordingly.

---

FAQ

Which languages? Whatever TED offers for the talk (often dozens). Set language; talks without that language are flagged.

Is there a Whisper/ASR step? No — it reads TED's own transcript, so it's fast and cheap.

Can I get subtitles? Yes — add srt and/or vtt to transcriptFormats.

Can I grab a whole topic or speaker's talks? Yes — set pageUrl to a TED topic/speaker page and the actor harvests the talk links. Add monitorMode to catch new talks.

How do I export? JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS from the Dataset tab, or via the Apify API.

---

Feedback

Want full-playlist crawling, speaker bios, or another language default? Open an issue on the actor.