How to get a YouTube transcript into ChatGPT or Claude

Ask an assistant about a video and it usually answers from the title and description. To summarise a two-hour lecture, pull the steps out of a tutorial or quote what someone actually said, it needs the transcript. Scrollhound fetches it, so Claude, ChatGPT or any other MCP client can read every word.

Three ways to get a transcript

1. YouTube’s own button. On a computer, open the video, expand the description under it (click …more), and click Show transcript. A panel opens beside the video with the text and timestamps; you can hide the timestamps from the panel’s menu and copy the rest. In the app, the transcript is in the expanded description too. There’s no download button, and the option only appears when the video has captions.

2. A transcript website. Free sites take a YouTube link and give you the text to copy. Handy for one video; you still paste it into your assistant by hand, and comments aren’t included.

3. A connector that does both steps. Your assistant fetches the transcript itself, every time you paste a link, and can read the comments, the channel’s other uploads or search results in the same chat. That’s what the rest of this guide sets up.

Add the connector

Scrollhound is a remote MCP server. The only part you need is its URL:

https://api.scrollhound.com/mcp

Claude: open Customize → Connectors, click + Add, then Add custom connector. Name it Scrollhound, paste the URL and click Add. Then, in a chat, click +, choose Connectors and turn it on.

ChatGPT (Business, Enterprise, Edu, or Pro): go to Plugins, click +, choose Add custom MCP server, paste the URL with OAuth authentication and select Create as a plugin. Then type @ in a chat and pick Scrollhound.

Either way you sign in with your email and a one-time code and approve the consent page. Menu names change from time to time; the Claude.ai and ChatGPT pages keep the current steps, and Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and the rest have their own.

Ask for a video

Paste a link and say what you want from it:

• “Get this lecture’s transcript and make a study outline with timestamps: https://youtu.be/…”
• “List this channel’s last 20 uploads and summarise the three most viewed: @…”
• “Find videos from the last month about pricing a SaaS product and compare what they recommend.”

Behind those, the assistant calls get_transcript, yt_get_video, yt_get_channel_videos and yt_search.

From the terminal

The same reads work in the CLI, which is handy in Claude Code or a script:

scrollhound transcript https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
scrollhound yt video https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
scrollhound yt channel @mkbhd --limit 30
scrollhound yt search "indie hacker pricing" --since 30d --sort views

yt video adds the video’s details to the transcript. transcript also works on an X post that has a video. Every YouTube command, with its options, limits and example output, is on the yt command page; the transcript page covers transcripts on every platform.

Long videos and videos without captions

When a video has captions, you get them. When it doesn’t, Scrollhound transcribes the audio instead. A long transcription can take a minute or two; until it’s ready the result says Status: pending, and asking again shortly gets the text.

Long transcripts come in chunks of about 20,000 characters. Each chunk ends with a next: line, and the assistant follows it when it needs the rest.

What it costs

A transcript is 1 credit. Transcribing a video with no captions that runs over 2 minutes adds 1 credit per started 5 minutes. Transcripts are kept for 30 days, so reading the same one again, or its next chunk, is free. A video with no speech uses no credits. The limits and credits page has the details.