How to convert video to text
Pick an MP4, MOV or WebM file from your device. If the video is large, your browser pulls the audio track out of it before anything is uploaded, so a two hour camera file does not have to travel over your connection in full. The upload is resumable, so a flaky connection will not lose your progress.
Once the upload finishes, the file joins the transcription queue and the page shows your position and an estimated wait. When it is done, the video transcript appears right on this page: every line carries a timestamp, and when more than one person is speaking, each line is labeled with the speaker.
Video transcription, not auto-captions
Player captions are a lowest-common-denominator transcript: no punctuation, no speakers, and shaky accuracy outside English. This tool runs the exact same pipeline as our paid product, on infrastructure we operate, and per-language accuracy is published openly on our benchmarks page. Your media is not sent to third-party AI providers, and speaker labels are included on every transcription rather than sold as an add-on.
What the free tool includes
One video per day, up to 45 minutes, with video files up to 2 GB and audio files up to 1 GB. Every transcript comes with timestamps, speaker labels, and automatic language detection across 52 languages and dialects. Free transcripts are deleted automatically about 24 hours after they finish, so copy what you need or sign up to keep them.
A free account adds signup credit, longer videos, exports (TXT, SRT, VTT and more), a searchable library, and cited answers to questions about your recordings. See pricing for the full picture.
What people transcribe video for
Subtitles and captions, searchable archives of webinars and course recordings, quotes pulled out of filmed interviews, and repurposing footage into written posts. A video transcript with timestamps doubles as an index into the footage, so finding the moment someone said something takes a search instead of a scrub.
More free tools
Already on YouTube? The free YouTube transcript generator takes a link instead of a file. For audio-only recordings there is the free audio to text converter, recorded classes work best in the lecture to notes converter, and filmed conversations in the free interview transcription tool. All of them are collected on the free tools page.