youtube-transcript-api

Why we included this project

Pulling the spoken text out of a YouTube video usually means either signing up for a paid transcript API or driving a headless browser with Selenium. This library sidesteps both: it reads YouTube's public transcript endpoints directly, so manually uploaded and auto-generated captions come back from a few Python calls with no API key required. When a video has translated captions, you can request those too, which helps when you want the same talk in several languages. The trade-off is that it depends on YouTube's internals rather than a stable paid service, so it can break when YouTube changes things; the project is actively maintained and typically patched quickly. For search indexing, summarization, or any pipeline that needs transcript text as input, that upkeep is a fair price.