Write YouTube episode show notes from a transcript
A lot of shows publish to YouTube alongside audio feeds, and show notes still get written the slow way — relistening with a notepad to reconstruct a summary and a timestamp list.
A transcript skips that step: export Markdown, pull a summary and a couple of pull-quotes directly from the text, and build a chapter/timestamp list from where the topic actually shifts, rather than guessing at round numbers. Because the source is the video itself, the timestamps line up with what viewers see on YouTube's own chapter markers.
- Markdown export is ready to paste into a show-notes template or CMS.
- Timestamped segments make chapter markers straightforward to write accurately.
- Same workflow whether the episode has YouTube captions or needed AI transcription.
YouTube specifics
- Typical length
- Widest range of any platform here — under a minute for Shorts, up to multi-hour lectures, podcasts, and livestream replays.
- Worth knowing
- Auto-captions are a real, extractable text track (not burned into the video image), but they're timed to a speech model, not to sentence boundaries, so segments can read short and choppy compared to a proper transcript.
Best formats for show notes and episode summaries
- Markdown — ready to paste into a show-notes template
- TXT — quick read-through for pull-quotes
Workflow
- Transcribe the YouTube episode.
- Export Markdown.
- Pull a summary, a chapter/timestamp list, and a couple of pull-quotes straight from the text.
FAQ
Related
The free tier includes 15 minutes of video a month, AI transcripts in any language, and TXT/SRT/VTT/JSON export — enough to run one YouTube video through and see the output before committing to anything.