YouTube Transcript & Subtitles — Whisper ASR, SRT & VTT

Transcribes the actual audio of YouTube videos with Whisper large-v3.

Most YouTube transcript tools read the caption track YouTube already published. That returns nothing when captions are missing, and returns YouTube's own mistakes when they are auto-generated. This one reads the audio. otherwise. This one downloads the audio and runs speech recognition on it, so it behaves the same whether captions exist or not.

What it handles that caption-readers don't

• Videos with no subtitles at all — the majority of TikTok and Instagram.
• TikTok and Instagram, not just YouTube.
• Any language, auto-detected, including videos whose captions are only available in one language.
• Auto-generated captions you don't trust — this reads the audio directly.

Pricing

$0.004 per minute of audio transcribed. Rounded up to the minute.

That is roughly 6× cheaper than other actors that run real speech recognition (they charge $0.025–$0.05 per minute), because transcription runs on dedicated GPUs instead of inside the Actor.

You are not charged when there is nothing to transcribe — a silent video, a photo post, or a carousel returns a labelled row at no cost.

Input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.tiktok.com/@nasa/video/7670721000471891214",
    "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/reel/Dbn-XJhk0_-/",
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk"
  ],
  "language": null,
  "includeSegments": true,
  "maxDurationSeconds": 3600
}

Field	Meaning
urls	Video URLs. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.
language	ISO code (en, fr, es…). Leave empty to auto-detect — detection is reliable and free.
includeSegments	Sentence-level segments with start/end times.
maxDurationSeconds	Skip anything longer. Guards against transcribing a multi-hour stream by accident.
instagramCookies	Instagram only. See below.

Instagram requires a session

Instagram returns an empty media response to anonymous requests — every public post, no exceptions. Export cookies from a logged-in browser (Netscape format) and pass them in instagramCookies. They are written to a temporary file and deleted when the run ends; they are never stored.

YouTube and TikTok need no credentials.

Output

{
  "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@nasa/video/7670721000471891214",
  "platform": "tiktok",
  "videoId": "7670721000471891214",
  "title": "There's nothing like watching humanity leave Earth.",
  "uploader": "nasa",
  "durationSeconds": 29.93,
  "language": "en",
  "languageConfidence": 0.962,
  "transcript": "Booster ignition and lift off, the crew of Artemis 2 now bound for the moon…",
  "segments": [{ "debut": 0.0, "fin": 4.2, "texte": "Booster ignition and lift off" }],
  "source": "audio-asr",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-06T04:10:18.295Z"
}

source is always audio-asr — it is there so you can verify the text came from speech recognition rather than from a caption file.

Rows that could not be transcribed carry errorType:

errorType	Meaning
no_audio_track	Silent video, or the post is a photo / carousel. Not charged.
extraction_failed	The video could not be downloaded — private, deleted, or region-locked.

Notes

Long videos are fine: a 19-minute YouTube video returns 257 timestamped segments. Very long recordings are limited by maxDurationSeconds, which you can raise.

Residential proxies are recommended for TikTok and Instagram, which rate-limit datacenter IP ranges.