Video to text
Get a transcript from any video — meetings, lectures, screen recordings or clips from your phone. Download subtitles in the same step.
- No account, no signup
- TXT, SRT and VTT are generated in your browser
- Size and length limits shown before you upload
How it works
Upload the video
MP4, MOV, MKV and WEBM are supported. You do not need to extract the audio first.
Set the language
Choosing the spoken language explicitly gives a noticeably better result than leaving it to be guessed.
Take the text or the subtitles
Copy the transcript, or download SRT or VTT to load straight into a video editor or player.
The picture is discarded, and that is the point
A video file is a container holding at least two separate streams: the picture and the sound. Only the sound carries speech, so the first thing that happens to your upload is that the audio track is separated out and everything visual is thrown away.
This has a practical consequence worth knowing. Video resolution has no effect whatsoever on transcript quality. A 4K recording and a 480p recording of the same meeting produce identical transcripts if the audio is identical. What the resolution does affect is the file size, and therefore how long the upload takes — which is why downscaling a large video before uploading saves you time and costs you nothing in accuracy.
It also means you do not need to run the file through a converter first. Extracting the audio yourself is a step that changes nothing about the result.
Where video audio goes wrong
Video recordings tend to have worse audio than dedicated audio recordings, for a simple reason: the microphone was positioned for the camera, not for the speech. A camera at the back of a room captures the room, not the person talking at the front.
Screen recordings are the opposite case and usually transcribe very well. The speaker is talking directly into a headset or laptop microphone, there is one voice, and there is almost no room noise. If you have the choice, a screen recording of a presentation will give you a better transcript than a camera recording of the same presentation.
Meeting recordings sit in between. Modern meeting software mixes each participant into one track, which removes the distance problem but introduces a new one: when two people speak at once, both voices land in the same track at full volume, and that section will be the least reliable part of the transcript.
From transcript to subtitles
Every transcript comes with timing information, so a subtitle file is available without processing the video a second time. SRT is the format almost every editor and player accepts. VTT is the format used on the web, and is what you want if the video will be embedded in a page.
Both files are plain text. If you open one you will see numbered blocks with a start time, an end time and a line of speech. That means you can edit them in any text editor after downloading, and it means fixing a mistake does not require coming back here.
One habit worth adopting: correct the transcript on this page before downloading the subtitles, not after. The correction is applied to every format you export, so doing it once saves doing it three times.
What people use it for
Meeting recordings
Turn an hour of video into notes you can skim in five minutes.
Lectures and training
Give people a readable version they can search, alongside the recording.
Subtitling your own videos
Produce SRT or VTT without typing them out or paying for a service.
Repurposing content
Use the transcript as the raw material for an article, summary or set of clips.
Supported formats
Audio
Video
Up to 1000 MB and 360 minutes
Frequently asked questions
Which video formats work?
MP4, MOV, MKV and WEBM. MP4 covers most phones and meeting apps, MOV is common on Apple devices, and WEBM is typical of browser-based recorders.
Does video quality affect the transcript?
No. Only the audio track is used, so resolution and bitrate of the picture make no difference. They only affect how large the file is and how long it takes to upload.
Should I extract the audio before uploading?
There is no need. The audio is separated automatically. Extracting it yourself changes nothing except adding a step, though it does make the upload smaller if your connection is slow.
Can I get subtitles as well as text?
Yes, both come from the same conversion. Download SRT for most editors and players, or VTT for video embedded on a web page.
Other converters
Ready to try it with your own file?
No account, no watermark. Pick a file and the transcript comes back on this page.