We Built a Free Chrome Extension for YouTube Transcripts — Here Is Exactly What It Does

On 22 October 2026 the TranscribeYouTube extension went live on the Chrome Web Store. It is free, it needs no account and it has no analytics. This post is the honest version of the launch note: why we built it, what it does, what it does not do, and how it works underneath.

Why we built it

We run transcribeyoutube.com, a free website that turns a YouTube link into a transcript. It works well when you already know which video you want. But most of the time the video is already open in front of you, and YouTube's own transcript panel has two gaps that matter to anyone who works with video for a living: you cannot search it, and you cannot download it.

For an editor that is a real cost. When a creator asks for "the bit where I talk about the budget", someone has to scrub through the video to find it. So we put a searchable transcript where the video is.

What it does

The extension adds a Transcript panel beside the YouTube player, and a floating panel on Shorts. From there you can:

• Search the transcript and see a match count, with whole-word and regex options when a plain search is too loose.
• Click any line to jump to that moment. With follow-video on, the current line highlights as the video plays.
• Shift+click a time to copy a link to that exact moment.
• Translate into about 150 languages, using YouTube's own machine translation.
• Use chapters from the description as a picker and as headings.
• Copy a quote with the words, the video title, the time and a link.
• Save highlights on your device, browse them in the popup library, and export them to Markdown or Obsidian.
• Download as TXT (one line per caption, or clean paragraphs), SRT, an editor-ready SRT, VTT or Markdown.

Alt+T opens and closes the panel, Esc closes it, and there are light and dark themes.

What it does not do

It does not transcribe audio. This is the most important line in this post. The extension reads the caption track the video already has: the creator's own subtitles, or YouTube's auto-captions. It never listens to the video. If a creator has turned captions off, there is nothing to read, and the panel says so rather than guessing.

We would rather say that plainly than have someone install it expecting a speech-to-text engine.

AI that stays on your computer

There are two ways to get a summary out of a transcript.

Ask AI opens ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity with the transcript and a prompt you pick: a summary, key takeaways, key moments, study notes, a quiz, a blog outline, a social thread, an "explain simply", or your own.

Summarize on this computer runs the same prompts, plus a question box, on Chrome's built-in AI (Gemini Nano, Chrome 138 and newer). The transcript never leaves the browser. It needs about 22 GB of free disk space and either a GPU with 4 GB of memory or 16 GB of RAM. On older Chrome or weaker hardware, the extension falls back to the online chats instead.

As for what it stores: your display preferences (synced) and any highlights you save (on your device). The only network calls are to youtube.com for the page you are on, and, only if YouTube's route fails, a fallback request to transcribeyoutube.com with the video id. The full policy is on the extension page.

How creators and editors use the SRT export

This is the part most useful to editors. A plain SRT gives you the captions exactly as YouTube timed them. The editor-ready SRT re-wraps them to 42 characters a line and at most two lines per caption, a common convention for readable on-screen subtitles.

A typical use: an editor cutting a Short from a long video searches the transcript for the moment, Shift+clicks the time to share it with the creator, then downloads the editor-ready SRT and drops it into the timeline as a starting point for captions. It is a draft, not a finished subtitle file. Auto-captions still need a human pass, which is the part of video editing that no tool removes.

How it was built

The extension is Manifest V3. YouTube's player already requests the caption track for the video you are watching, so a small bridge script runs in the page's own context and re-fetches that same caption request, then hands the lines to the panel. There is no Shinel server in the normal path at all; the transcribeyoutube.com fallback exists only for when YouTube's route fails. The source code is on GitHub.

The longer story of how the website itself was built, and why search is its only acquisition channel, is in our TranscribeYouTube case study.

Try it

• Add TranscribeYouTube to Chrome (free, no account)
• How the extension works, and its privacy policy
• Our transcript tool page, with screenshots and FAQs

If something does not work on a video you care about, write to [email protected] and tell us the link.