😤 The YouTube auto-caption problem
YouTube has auto-captions on most videos. So why doesn't anyone use them as a real transcript? Three reasons everyone learns the hard way:
- No speakers. A two-person podcast becomes one wall of text. You can't tell who said what.
- No timestamps you can click. Word-level alignment is missing — you can't jump back to "the part at 14:23 where she mentioned X."
- Crud you have to delete. "[Music]", repeated phrases, mis-heard names, no punctuation in long stretches.
Copy-pasting the auto-caption pane and cleaning it by hand takes longer than the video itself.
⚡ What Whipscribe does instead
Paste the YouTube URL. We pull the audio with yt-dlp, run it through Whisper-large-v3 on our GPU, label speakers with diarization, and hand you back a transcript with:
- Speaker tags (Speaker 1, Speaker 2 — rename them to real names with one click).
- Word-level timestamps — click any word, the audio jumps to that exact moment.
- Punctuation, capitalisation, and "[Music]" tags actually stripped.
- SRT, VTT, DOCX, or plain-text export.
A 60-minute YouTube video lands in about 2 minutes on our pipeline. A 10-minute video lands in under 30 seconds.
🎯 What people actually use this for
- Researchers citing what a specific guest said on a specific podcast episode.
- Journalists who need a quote with a timestamp anchor for fact-checking.
- Creators repurposing a 90-min interview into a blog post or a TikTok pull-quote.
- People who can't watch a 2-hour video and just want to skim it.
Try it on the next YouTube link you would have skipped.
First hour is free. No card. Any URL works.
Paste a YouTube link YouTube · podcast feeds · MP3 · MP4 · direct file URLs — anything yt-dlp recognises.