YouTube Transcript API

The fastest YouTube transcript API — extract, transcribe, and transform video content at scale.

Website • Full API Docs • Pricing • Quick Start • Examples

Why YouTubeTranscript.dev?

Most YouTube transcript tools break when videos don't have captions. We don't. Our API extracts existing captions and transcribes directly from audio using AI speech recognition — covering 100% of YouTube videos.

• ⚡ Lightning fast — Cached transcripts return in under 2 seconds
• 🎙 Audio transcription (ASR) — No captions? We transcribe from the audio track
• 🌍 100+ languages — Multilingual support with on-demand translation
• 📤 Multiple formats — Timestamps, paragraphs, word-level output
• 📚 Batch processing — Up to 100 videos per request
• 🔔 Webhooks — Async processing with delivery to your endpoint
• 💰 Predictable pricing — 1 credit per transcript, no surprises
• 🔒 Production ready — 99.9% uptime SLA

→ Get your free API key

API V2 Overview

V2 is the streamlined, user-owned transcript model. It prioritizes fast cache hits, consistent responses, and no surprise translations unless you explicitly request a language.

How V2 Works

1. Check your owned transcripts (0 credits) — if you've already fetched it, it's free
2. Fetch captions (1 credit) — if not owned yet
3. Translate (1 credit per 2,500 chars) — only when you request a specific language
4. ASR transcription (1 credit per 90 seconds) — async via webhook, for videos without captions

Endpoints

Credit Costs

Quick Start

1. Get Your API Key

Sign up at youtubetranscript.dev and grab your API key from the Dashboard.

2. Extract a Transcript

curl -X POST https://youtubetranscript.dev/api/v2/transcribe \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"video": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"}'

3. With Options

curl -X POST https://youtubetranscript.dev/api/v2/transcribe \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "video": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "language": "es",
    "format": "timestamp"
  }'

4. Batch Request (up to 100 videos)

curl -X POST https://youtubetranscript.dev/api/v2/batch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "video_ids": [
      "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
      "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID_2",
      "VIDEO_ID_3"
    ]
  }'

5. ASR with Webhook (videos without captions)

curl -X POST https://youtubetranscript.dev/api/v2/transcribe \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "video": "VIDEO_ID",
    "source": "asr",
    "webhook_url": "https://yoursite.com/webhook"
  }'

Returns immediately with status: "processing". Results are delivered to your webhook when ready.

Request Reference

Headers

Request Fields

Webhook Behavior

• Requests with webhook_url return immediately with status: "processing"
• Batch requests return cached results immediately and queue only the missing items
• Your webhook receives the final results when processing completes

Error Codes

→ Full API Documentation & OpenAPI Spec

Examples

Install the SDK (Node.js / TypeScript)

npm install youtube-audio-transcript-api

Node.js / TypeScript (SDK)

import { YouTubeTranscript } from "youtube-audio-transcript-api";

const yt = new YouTubeTranscript({ apiKey: "your_api_key" });

// Simple — one line
const result = await yt.getTranscript("dQw4w9WgXcQ");
console.log(result.data?.transcript.text);

// With options
const translated = await yt.transcribe({
  video: "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  language: "es",
  format: { timestamp: true },
});

// Batch — up to 100 videos
const batch = await yt.batch({
  video_ids: ["dQw4w9WgXcQ", "jNQXAC9IVRw", "9bZkp7q19f0"],
});

// ASR for videos without captions
const asr = await yt.transcribe({
  video: "VIDEO_ID",
  source: "asr",
  allow_asr: true,
  webhook_url: "https://yoursite.com/webhook",
});

→ Full SDK documentation

Python

import requests

API_KEY = "your_api_key"

# Single video
response = requests.post(
    "https://youtubetranscript.dev/api/v2/transcribe",
    headers={
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}",
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
    },
    json={"video": "dQw4w9WgXcQ"}
)

data = response.json()
for segment in data["data"]["transcript"]:
    print(f"[{segment['start']:.1f}s] {segment['text']}")

JavaScript / Node.js (without SDK)

const response = await fetch("https://youtubetranscript.dev/api/v2/transcribe", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "Authorization": `Bearer ${API_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({ video: "dQw4w9WgXcQ" }),
});

const { data } = await response.json();
console.log(data.transcript.text);

More Examples

Check the /examples directory for complete, runnable scripts:

Use Cases

🤖 AI & LLM Pipelines

Feed video transcripts into GPT, Claude, or any LLM. Build RAG systems, knowledge bases, and AI assistants powered by YouTube content.

🎯 Content Repurposing

Turn YouTube videos into blog posts, social media content, newsletters, and more.

🔬 Research & Analysis

Analyze video content at scale — sentiment analysis, topic modeling, trend detection across thousands of videos.

📊 SEO & Marketing

Extract competitor video strategies, generate SEO-optimized content from videos, and analyze trends across your niche.

🎓 Education

Transcribe lectures, courses, and tutorials. Make video content searchable and accessible.

♿ Accessibility

Generate accurate captions and subtitles for videos that don't have them, in 100+ languages.

Comparison with youtube-transcript-api (Python)

The open-source youtube-transcript-api Python package is a great tool, but it has limitations:

Issues & Feedback

This is the public repository for YouTubeTranscript.dev. The API is proprietary, but we use this repo to collect feedback from our developer community.

How you can help:

• 🐛 Bug Reports — Found an issue with the API? Open an issue
• 💡 Feature Requests — Have an idea? Start a discussion
• 📖 Documentation Errors — Spot something wrong in the docs? Let us know
• ⭐ Star this repo — Help other developers find us

Links

• 🌐 Website
• 📦 npm SDK
• 📖 API Documentation
• 📐 OpenAPI Spec (YAML)
• 💰 Pricing
• 📧 support@youtubetranscript.dev
• 💼 LinkedIn

License

The code examples and documentation in this repository are licensed under the MIT License.

The YouTubeTranscript.dev API is a proprietary service. See Terms of Service.

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