How to Find Vsauce Video Transcripts

Vsauce videos are published on YouTube, so a transcript is usually the caption track attached to each video. YouTube can display that track as a timestamped transcript you can read, search and copy. This guide shows how to open it, how to check the copied text, and what to do when a video has no transcript.

Before you start

• The transcript is generated from captions YouTube already stores for the video. Nothing is processed on your computer unless you transcribe the audio yourself.
• Vsauce, Vsauce2 and Vsauce3 are separate channels. Search for the exact video title and confirm the channel name before you look for the transcript.
• A transcript exists only if the video has captions, either uploaded by the creator or generated automatically. Availability differs from video to video and by language.
• A desktop browser makes selecting and copying text easiest. The mobile app can display the transcript, but copying from it is more limited.
• The transcript contains the creator's words. Reading or quoting it for study is different from republishing it, so check copyright before reusing large portions.

Step-by-step instructions

In a desktop browser

• 1. Open the Vsauce video page on YouTube.
• 2. Click the description below the video, or its "more" label, to expand it.
• 3. Scroll to the end of the expanded description and choose "Show transcript". A panel with timestamped lines opens beside the video.
• 4. If the panel offers a language selector, pick the caption track you want. Creator-uploaded tracks are generally more reliable than tracks marked as auto-generated.
• 5. To get cleaner text, open the panel's three-dot menu and turn timestamps off, if that option is shown.
• 6. Click a line to jump to that moment in the video, or select the text in the panel and paste it into a text editor.

YouTube changes its layout from time to time. Older versions placed the transcript option in the three-dot menu below the player instead of in the description. If you don't see it in one place, check the other.

In the mobile app

Tap the video title or description to expand it, then scroll down to the transcript option. Labels and placement can vary between app versions. If you only need to follow along while watching, turning on captions with the CC control in the player is enough. Turning captions off again restores the original view.

Check the output

• Spot-check a few lines against the audio by clicking their timestamps, especially lines with names, numbers or technical terms.
• Auto-generated captions often get unusual vocabulary wrong. Vsauce videos use a lot of scientific, mathematical and philosophical terms, plus wordplay, so check these carefully.
• Pasted transcripts have no speaker labels and no paragraph breaks. If timestamps were left on, they may appear on separate lines and need removing.
• Captions cover speech only. On-screen text, diagrams and visual jokes are not included.
• Save the result as plain text and note the video title and channel, so you can trace each quote back to its source.

Common problems and next steps

No transcript option appears: open the expanded description again and look in the three-dot menu, or try another browser. If the CC control is also unavailable, the video has no captions and YouTube has no transcript for it.

Only an auto-generated track exists: treat it as a draft. Correct it against the audio before quoting, and expect missing punctuation.

The transcript is in the wrong language: switch tracks with the language selector in the transcript panel, if one is offered. The player's caption settings may offer auto-translation, but machine-translated captions are less accurate than the original track.

Finding a specific quote: with the transcript panel open, your browser's find-on-page command can usually search the panel text. Clicking the matching line jumps the video to that moment.

Copying a long video is awkward: copy the transcript in sections and paste each one in order. Check that no lines were skipped where sections meet.

Transcript pages on third-party sites usually reproduce the same captions, sometimes from an older version. Compare them with the transcript on YouTube before relying on them.

No captions exist at all: you can transcribe the speech with a speech-to-text tool, but only from an audio source you are permitted to use. Recognition accuracy depends mainly on clear speech. Heavy compression, low audio bitrate and background music reduce it, while the video's frame rate or recording format makes little difference. Before uploading anything, check whether the tool runs locally or sends files to an online service, and how that service stores the files.