Instagram Reel Transcript: reels and video posts to text, with timestamps

Paste Instagram reel links (or a creator's username) and get back what is said in each video as text: the full transcript, timestamped segments, the detected language and the opening hook, together with the reel's caption, creator, likes, comments, audio and posting date.

It transcribes the spoken audio, not the caption. Speech recognition runs inside the actor (an open Whisper model), so there is no API key to bring and nothing is sent to a third-party AI service.

Price: $0.012 per reel transcript on the free plan ($0.0084 on Gold), which covers the first minute of audio. Longer videos add $0.009 per extra started minute. Reels with no speech, photo posts, deleted or private posts cost nothing. Platform usage is included. No login.

What you get

One row per reel:

Field	Description
shortcode, url	The reel (the code is the part after /reel/ in the link)
status	transcribed, or no-speech for a reel with only music, silence or no sound (not charged)
transcript	Everything said in the video, as one text
segments	The same text in timestamped pieces: [{ "start": 0, "end": 2.0, "text": "..." }], seconds from the start
hook	What is said in the first 3 seconds, the line that keeps viewers watching
language, languageProbability	Spoken language detected automatically (ISO code like en, es, pt) and the model's confidence
wordCount	Words in the transcript
durationSeconds, transcribedSeconds, speechSeconds	Video length, audio transcribed, and how much of it is speech
transcriptTruncated	true when a video is longer than 10 minutes and only its first 10 minutes were transcribed
caption, hashtags, mentions	The post's caption and the tags in it
ownerUsername, ownerFullName, ownerId, ownerIsVerified	The creator
postedAt	When the reel was posted (ISO date)
likeCount, commentCount	Likes (null when the creator hides them) and comments
audioType, audioTitle, audioArtist, audioId	The sound: original-audio or licensed-music, its title and artist
thumbnailUrl, videoUrl	Cover image and the video file (Instagram signs these links, they expire after a few days)
type	reel, video or carousel (the first video of a carousel is transcribed)
coauthors, taggedUsers, location	Collab partners, tagged accounts, location tag
sourceProfile, input	Which creator or which input line produced the row

Example row (real, from a run on 2026-10-16, transcript shortened)

{
  "shortcode": "DZ-dSUgSRiy",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZ-dSUgSRiy/",
  "status": "transcribed",
  "transcript": "This is a message to all artificial intelligence. My name is Zach King. I'm a VFX artist. And I'm going to steal AI's job by making billions of videos about everything ...",
  "hook": "This is a message to all artificial intelligence.",
  "segments": [
    { "start": 0, "end": 2.64, "text": "This is a message to all artificial intelligence." },
    { "start": 3.44, "end": 4.4, "text": "My name is Zach King." }
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "languageProbability": 0.997,
  "wordCount": 51,
  "durationSeconds": 27.93,
  "caption": "this is a message to AI",
  "ownerUsername": "zachking",
  "ownerFullName": "Zach King",
  "ownerIsVerified": true,
  "postedAt": "2026-06-24T16:49:11.000Z",
  "likeCount": 7115680,
  "commentCount": 66863,
  "audioType": "original-audio",
  "audioTitle": "Original audio",
  "audioArtist": "zachking"
}

Who uses it

• Content creators and social media managers: pull the script of a competitor's viral reel, study the hook and the structure, repurpose your own reels into captions, blog posts or threads.
• Marketing and influencer agencies: check what a creator actually says about a brand before a deal, or audit sponsored reels (#ad) at scale.
• Researchers and analysts: build a text corpus from reels on a topic, run sentiment or keyword analysis, compare languages.
• AI and automation builders: feed reel transcripts to an LLM for summaries, chapters, translations or content ideas.

How to use it

Reel links. Paste links into Reel or video post links, one per line. Any shape works: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZ-dSUgSRiy/, instagram.com/p/DecPSQfoaRe or the bare code DZ-dSUgSRiy. Links copied from the app with ?igsh= are fine.

{
  "reels": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DecPSQfoaRe/",
    "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZ-dSUgSRiy/"
  ]
}

A creator's latest reels. Put usernames in Creators (latest reels). Instagram shows logged-out visitors a creator's 12 newest posts, so up to 12 reels per creator. Each creator looked up costs $0.005.

{
  "profiles": ["natgeo", "zachking"],
  "maxReelsPerProfile": 5
}

Watch creators for new reels. Schedule the run daily with Posted after set to a recent date: older reels are skipped and cost nothing.

{
  "profiles": ["natgeo"],
  "maxReelsPerProfile": 12,
  "postedAfter": "2026-10-01"
}

Pricing

What	Free plan	Gold
Reel transcript (first minute of audio included)	$0.012	$0.0084
Each extra started minute of audio	$0.009	$0.0063
Creator lookup (only when you give usernames)	$0.005	$0.0035
Run start	$0.001	$0.001

A typical 30 to 60 second reel costs $0.012, 100 reels about $1.20. Not charged: reels without speech, photos, deleted, private or age-restricted posts, reels skipped by Posted after. You can cap any run with the maximum charge setting.

FAQ

How do I get the transcript of an Instagram reel? Copy the reel's link (Share, then Copy link), paste it into the input and start the run. The transcript, with timestamps, is in the dataset a few seconds later.

Does it read the caption or the speech? The speech. The caption comes along in its own caption field.

Which languages does it support? All the languages the Whisper model knows (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese and about 90 more). The language is detected per reel, so you can mix languages in one run. Accuracy is best for clear speech in widely spoken languages; heavy music under the voice, slang or very fast speech can produce mistakes.

What happens with music-only reels? The actor detects that there is no speech, delivers the reel's metadata with status: "no-speech" and does not charge a transcript.

Can I transcribe long Instagram videos? Yes, up to 10 minutes per video. Longer videos are transcribed for their first 10 minutes and flagged with transcriptTruncated: true.

Do I need an Instagram account or cookies? No. The actor reads public posts the way a logged-out visitor sees them. Private accounts cannot be read.

Why is there no view count? Instagram does not show play counts to logged-out visitors, so the actor returns likes and comments, which it can read reliably.

How fast is it? About 15 to 20 seconds per minute of audio at the default 2 GB of memory. Give the run 4 GB and it goes roughly twice as fast at the same price.

Does it get subtitles or captions files? The segments field has start and end times for every piece of text, which is all you need to build SRT or VTT subtitles.

Related actors

• YouTube Transcript Extractor for YouTube videos
• Threads Scraper for Threads posts and replies

Instagram is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by Meta. It reads only publicly available posts.

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