Fetch YouTube Transcript

Fetch the transcript of a YouTube video from Raycast — save it as a text file, copy it to your clipboard, or hand it to Raycast AI to summarize.

Features

• Fetch a transcript from any YouTube video that has captions
• Save it to a folder of your choice, or copy it straight to the clipboard
• 16 languages, with your preferred one set once in preferences
• Works with Raycast AI, so you can summarize a video or turn it into notes

Requirement: yt-dlp

This extension uses yt-dlp, a command-line tool for interacting with YouTube. You must install it for the extension to work.

brew install yt-dlp

If you do not use Homebrew, see the yt-dlp installation guide for other options.

It is worth updating yt-dlp occasionally (brew upgrade yt-dlp), since YouTube changes frequently and older versions can stop working.

Usage

1. Run the Fetch YouTube Transcript command.
2. Paste the video URL.
3. Optionally pick an action for this run — save to a file, or copy to the clipboard. If you leave it empty, your default action is used.

The transcript is fetched and either saved or copied. When saving, the file is named after the video title and placed in your chosen folder.

Supported links

Full URLs and share links both work:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/live/VIDEO_ID
• https://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID

Using It with Raycast AI

The extension also exposes transcript fetching to Raycast AI, so you can work with a video's contents in plain English instead of opening the saved file yourself.

Type @fetch-youtube-transcript in Raycast AI, or paste a link and ask for what you want:

• "Summarize this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"
• "What are the key points of https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID?"
• "Get the Hindi transcript of this video and translate the main ideas to English"

Because the AI receives the transcript as plain text, it can pass it on to your other extensions — for example, writing the summary straight into your notes app.

Worth knowing:

• The AI can request a different language for a single question without changing your Default Language preference.
• For long videos the AI reads the transcript in parts, and is told when it has only seen a portion, so it can say a summary is partial instead of presenting it as complete.
• This does not change the command. Transcripts you save are still saved in full, whatever the length of the video.

Preferences

Preference	Description
Default Download Folder	Where saved transcripts go. Defaults to your Downloads folder.
Default Language	The caption language to request. Defaults to English.
Default Action	Whether the command saves to a file or copies to the clipboard when you do not choose per run.

Troubleshooting

"yt-dlp executable not found"

The extension looks for yt-dlp in the usual Homebrew locations and on your PATH. If you installed it somewhere else, point the extension at it by setting the YT_DLP_PATH environment variable to the full path of the binary. You can find that path with:

which yt-dlp

"Transcript Not Available - No captions found"

The video has no captions in the language you requested. Not every video has captions, and auto-generated ones are not available in every language. Try English, or a different video.

The transcript downloads but looks wrong or stops early

YouTube changes often. Update yt-dlp first — most such problems are fixed by a newer version.

Notes

Transcripts are usually auto-generated by YouTube, so expect missing punctuation and the occasional mis-transcribed word.

Author

Apoorv Khandelwal

License

MIT