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.

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.

Frequently asked questions

How do I get the transcript of a YouTube video? Paste the video URL into urls and run the actor. No account, no API key and no cookies are required for public videos.

What if the video has no captions? That is the normal case, and it changes nothing here. This actor never reads a caption track — it downloads the audio and runs speech recognition on it, so a video without captions returns exactly the same quality of result.

Which languages are supported? Whisper large-v3 covers 100+ languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Arabic, Hindi and Japanese. Language is auto-detected by default; set language to force one.

How much does it cost? $0.004 per minute of audio actually transcribed, rounded up. A 45-second video costs $0.004, and 1 000 short videos cost about $4. Silent videos, photo posts and failed downloads are not billed at all.

Can I process a whole account or playlist? Yes — pass every video URL in urls. Pair it with any profile or playlist scraper to collect those URLs first.

What do people use it for? Content and competitor research, hook analysis, subtitle production, repurposing short video into written content, making video libraries full-text searchable, and building speech datasets.