YouTube's built-in captions are often inaccurate — auto-generated captions miss technical terms, names, and non-English content. You can get much better results by transcribing locally with Whisper AI.
Why Transcribe Locally?
- Better accuracy — Whisper's Large v3 model significantly outperforms YouTube's auto-captions
- Privacy — The video and transcript stay on your device
- No API costs — Run Whisper locally instead of paying per-minute for cloud transcription
- Works with 1,800+ sites — Not just YouTube — Twitter/X, Vimeo, SoundCloud, podcasts, and more
How to Do It with VoxBee
- Copy the YouTube URL
- Open VoxBee and paste the URL in the transcription tab
- VoxBee downloads the audio (via yt-dlp) and transcribes it locally with Whisper
- Get a timestamped transcript — export as TXT, SRT, or Markdown
For long videos, VoxBee automatically chunks the audio into 30-second segments and stitches the transcript together, handling overlap and silence detection.
AI Summaries
After transcription, you can optionally send the transcript (not the audio) to an AI provider for a summary. This is great for long lectures, podcast episodes, and conference talks.
Supported Sites
VoxBee uses yt-dlp under the hood, which supports 1,800+ sites:
- YouTube, YouTube Music
- Twitter/X, Vimeo, Dailymotion
- SoundCloud, Bandcamp
- Twitch clips
- Podcast RSS feeds and direct audio links
DRM-protected content (Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music) won't work, but most publicly accessible audio and video is supported.
Getting Started
Download VoxBee — paste a YouTube URL and get a transcript in minutes. Free 14-day trial, no account needed.