Simple Transcript Capture is a Chrome extension that pulls transcripts from YouTube and other captioned pages and saves them as text files. Click the icon, click copy or download, get a transcript.
Every transcription tool wants you to create an account and pay a monthly subscription. Otter.ai, Fireflies, Tactiq all charge $8 to $40 per month. Simple Transcript Capture is a one-time purchase that pulls the transcript that already exists on the page. Your transcripts stay on your computer.
For YouTube videos, the extension fetches captions from YouTube’s public InnerTube endpoint, the same API that powers the captions track on youtube.com. For other pages, it scans the DOM for visible transcript blocks (lecture pages, podcast players, court transcripts, anything with on-page captions). No microphone is used. No audio is recorded. No speech recognition is performed. The extension reads the transcript that the page already has.
The extension is free to use with plain text export. An optional Pro upgrade ($14.99 one-time) unlocks SRT subtitle export with timestamps and additional features.
Simple Transcript Capture was built by Duncan Rawlinson, a photographer and technologist based in Canada.
Transcript extraction runs locally in your browser. Files save straight to your Downloads folder. The only network requests the extension makes are: a fetch to YouTube’s public captions endpoint when you extract a YouTube transcript, and a one-time Pro license validation if you choose to upgrade. Read the full Privacy Policy for details.