Show transcript

How to see the transcript on YouTube

To see the transcript on YouTube, expand the description and click Show transcript — the panel opens beside the video and scrolls as it plays. This page covers desktop, mobile, why the button sometimes goes missing, and how to keep the words. Paste a link below if you’d rather take them with you.

Works on any video with captions · or add the Chrome extension for one-click transcripts on every video.

Show the transcript on desktop

YouTube has a built-in transcript — it’s just tucked out of the way. Here’s where to find it:

1. Expand the description. Click the “…more” line or anywhere in the description box under the video.
2. Click “Show transcript”. It sits at the very bottom of the expanded description.
3. Read the panel. The transcript opens on the right, above the suggested videos, and scrolls in time with playback.

That’s the whole trick. The panel stays open as you watch, highlighting the current line, and you can close it any time with the X at the top. For the background on where these words come from, the YouTube transcript overview goes deeper.

Expand the description, click Show transcript. It was there the whole time.

Read along and jump to any moment

The panel isn’t just for reading — it’s a map of the video. As the video plays, the current line is highlighted, so you can follow the words and the audio together. Click any line and the video jumps straight to that moment, which turns a long video into something you can navigate by text: spot the part you want, click, and you’re there. It beats dragging the scrubber and hoping you land in the right place.

It’s also the easy way to read along with a fast or heavily accented speaker — the words on the page keep pace with the audio, so you catch the lines you’d otherwise miss. Some people leave the panel open for the whole video as a kind of live subtitle list they can scroll back through; others use it to check a single quote without losing their place. The toggle at the top of the panel switches the timestamps’ format, but it can’t hide them — that’s one of the small things the panel won’t do, and a reason people reach for the tool below once they want the words a particular way.

See the transcript in the phone app

It’s there on mobile too, just in a different spot. Tap the video to open it, tap the description (the title area under the video), scroll down, and tap Show transcript. The panel opens below the video and scrolls as it plays, with the same tap-to-jump behaviour. The one catch is copying: selecting text in the app is fiddly, so if you want to keep the words, open the video in a browser and use the tool above instead.

No “Show transcript” button?

Sometimes the button just isn’t there. It almost always means the same thing: this video has no caption track. The uploader added none and YouTube generated none — common on music, very short clips, or unclear audio. The transcript panel is built from captions, so with no captions there’s nothing to show.

Keep the transcript: copy or export

Seeing the transcript is for watching. The moment you want to keep it — to quote, summarise or save — the panel gets in the way: there’s no copy-all button, every line drags a timestamp along, and on mobile you can barely select it. So lift the whole thing in one go instead: paste the video link into the tool above and the transcript comes back as one clean block you can copy or export as TXT, Markdown, SRT or VTT, with the timecodes on or off. For the full walkthrough see how to get the transcript of a YouTube video, and for the clipboard side specifically, copying a YouTube transcript covers the panel’s quirks.

See it in another language

YouTube’s panel shows the transcript in the caption language, and you can switch it: at the top of the panel there’s a language menu when the video offers more than one track, including auto-translate. Pick your language and the lines switch, in the same panel, without reloading the video. If you’d rather read and keep it in another language, the tool above translates the same captions in a click and lets you export the result — handy for following a foreign-language talk as comfortably as a native one.

Frequently asked questions

How do I see the transcript on YouTube?

Expand the video description with “…more”, then click “Show transcript” at the bottom. The transcript opens beside the video and scrolls as it plays. Click any line to jump to that moment.

Why is there no Show transcript button?

The video has no caption track — the uploader added none and YouTube generated none. Without captions there’s nothing for the transcript panel to show, so the button doesn’t appear.

Can I see a YouTube transcript on mobile?

Yes. In the app, tap the video, expand the description, and tap “Show transcript”. It’s harder to copy from there, so for that, paste the link into the tool above in a browser.

How do I turn off the timestamps in the panel?

YouTube’s panel always shows a timestamp on every line. To read or copy without them, use the tool above and toggle the timecodes off.