Sometimes, you don’t have time to watch an entire YouTube tutorial when you’re trying to learn something on the fly—sometimes, it would be easier if you could just skim the text to find the step you’re stuck on. Of course, most YouTube videos don’t come with transcriptions, and transcribing them by hand is a non-starter. But you don’t need to: Here are some of the best ways to transcribe a YouTube video.
Real-time transcribing
If you want to watch the video all the way through at least once, you can consider real-time transcription that will create text as the video plays. This really only works if you have the time to dedicate to letting the whole thing play through, but can be helpful if there’s anything you actually need to see in the clip.
The first option is through Google Docs. In a blank doc, click “Tools” from the top menu and hit “Voice typing.” Minimize your windows so the Google Doc and YouTube video are both visible, play the video, and hit the “Speak” button in Google Docs. To test it out, I used The Kennedy Institute’s “Introduction to Bioethics: Bioethics at the Bedside” lecture, which clocks in at 10:58. Google Docs was able to pick up what the speaker was saying, but failed to punctuate it in a way that made sense, so be warned that you’ll be getting a ton of words in the doc that you’ll then have to go through and edit into something legible. That could be a pain or it could be helpful for reviewing and revising, so it depends on how you like to study.
Your other option for real-time transcribing is Otter.AI, which I’ve recommended a million times and will recommend a million more. It is a real-time transcriber that also makes a recording of whatever you’re transcribing, so you can play it back whenever you want. It easily differentiates between different speakers and you can give them names, which the service then appends to all of their speaking parts. Plus, it usually gets the punctuation right. I use it for interviews for work and for recording class lectures, letting it run on my phone while I work on the computer. With the free version, you get 300 monthly transcription minutes, but it can only record up to 30 minutes at a time. For $10 per month, you get 1,200 monthly minutes, up to 90 minutes at a time, and for $20 per month, you get 6,000 monthly minutes, and each chunk can go up to four hours.
Services that transcribe YouTube videos
When you don’t have the time or energy to let the whole thing play through, you still have options.
The first is Study Fetch, an AI service that makes study “sets” from a variety of materials, like practice tests, handwritten notes, and—you guessed it—audio and video imports. The prices range from $7.99 per month to $11.99 per month, but with that lower-priced option, you get five video/audio uploads per month.
The best one I’ve found, however, is free and fast. The aptly-named youtubetranscript.com took less than five seconds to produce a full transcript of the bioethics lecture, even adding in notes when there was “[APPLAUSE].” For another video that was over an hour long, it took about 10 seconds. If all you need is the transcript, nothing more and nothing less, this is it.
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