Why didn't my video transcribe? (captions required)
Step-by-step guide
How YT Transcriber actually works
YT Transcriber pulls the existing caption track from YouTube — it does NOT perform speech-to-text on the audio. This makes transcription fast and accurate, but it has one hard requirement: the video must already have captions on YouTube. If a video has no caption track at all, there is nothing for us to fetch, and the job will fail with a "no captions available" error. This is the single most common reason a video does not transcribe.
Check whether the video has captions
Open the video directly on YouTube.com and click the CC (Closed Captions) button on the player. If captions appear, the video can be transcribed. If the CC button is greyed out or missing, the video has no captions and cannot be transcribed at this time. Both creator-uploaded (manual) captions and YouTube’s auto-generated captions work — you just need one of them to exist.
Make sure the video is public
We can only read captions from public videos. Private and unlisted videos return an error even if they have captions. If the video was only just made public, wait a minute or two and try again — YouTube sometimes takes a moment to expose the caption track.
Try again or pick a different source
If the video genuinely has captions but still failed, open it on your Dashboard, click the three-dot menu (⋯) and choose "Re-transcribe" to submit a fresh job — this clears up transient network failures. If the video simply has no captions, there is no workaround within YT Transcriber today (we do not generate captions from audio). Look for a captioned version of the same content, or ask the creator to enable captions.
Still stuck? Contact support
If a public, captioned video repeatedly fails, go to Settings > Help & Support and submit a ticket with the YouTube URL. Our team will investigate and reply within one business day.
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