How to Get a Transcript of a YouTube Video, With Timestamps

Option 1: YouTube's own transcript panel

Under a video's description, open the "...more" menu and choose "Show transcript". YouTube lists the auto-generated captions beside the player, each line stamped with its time.

It works, with limits: the lines are caption fragments rather than sentences, there is no summary, and the panel cannot be exported. Copying it by hand pastes the timestamps in with the words, which is usually the opposite of what you want.

Option 2: paste the link into NoteBase

Paste any YouTube URL - a normal watch link, a youtu.be share link or a Short - into the box on the AI YouTube Video Summarizer page, choose the output language, and press Summarize. The transcript comes back as full sentences with speaker turns, a clickable timestamp on every paragraph, and an executive summary on top.

The note is saved to your library, so the video is searchable afterwards: search for a phrase and land on the second it was said.

• Works for lectures, podcasts, interviews and Shorts
• Timestamps stay clickable inside the note
• Output language can differ from the spoken one
• Free to try without a card

Option 3: download the audio and transcribe it

If a video has no captions at all, or you already have the audio, upload the file to the voice recorder and transcriber instead. It handles MP3, M4A and WAV, tags who is speaking, and produces the same kind of timestamped note.

What to do with the transcript

Once the transcript is a note, the rest of NoteBase works on it: build flashcards from a lecture, ask the AI chat what was said about a topic, or send the note to Notion with the headings and timestamps intact.