Spotify to Text

Use this responsibly. This tool finds the same episode's video on YouTube and reads the captions YouTube already has for it — it doesn't verify what they say, and we take no responsibility for a transcript's accuracy or for what you do with it. The episode and its captions still belong to whoever made them; using the output is your call to make against copyright law and each platform's own Terms of Service, the same as if you'd transcribed the episode yourself by hand.

What this tool does

Paste a Spotify episode link, get the words back. Spotify doesn't publish a public transcript API, and this tool never listens to Spotify's audio itself. Instead it finds the episode's matching YouTube video — most video podcasts and creator shows publish there too — and pulls the caption track for it, the same one YouTube to Text reads. Where a show makes a transcript available another way, the tool uses that instead.

If no transcript can be found, this tool tells you so. AI transcription of an episode's actual audio is coming as a separate tool, priced separately for the AI cost. This tool itself never calls any AI and never downloads audio.

You do need to be signed in. That's not a paywall — every account, including the free tier, gets full access. It's the one thing standing between this tool and bots hammering it into the ground for everyone else, same as on YouTube to Text.

Checking the result

The Spotify episode panel shows the episode you asked for, with a click-to-load Spotify player, and the Matched YouTube video panel shows the video the transcript was read from, with its title and channel under the player. Glance at both before trusting a transcript: if the video title doesn't look like your episode, the match is wrong and the words below it won't be either. The Details panel carries the episode title, show name and Spotify's own listed duration.

The tool never guesses at a video that might be wrong — when it can't find a convincing match it says so rather than handing you someone else's episode.

Choosing an output format

• Readable paragraphs — the default, and the one you want. Caption fragments get stitched back into real sentences and grouped into paragraphs, the way the episode would read if someone had typed it up by hand.
• Plain text — one continuous block, no line breaks. Feed it to another tool, a word counter, a search index — whatever wants raw text.
• Timestamped lines — every line prefixed with [12:34]. Built for finding the exact moment something was said, or wiring up show-notes jump links.
• SRT and WebVTT — real subtitle files with proper start/end timecodes, ready for a video editor or a re-upload.
• JSON — every cue as { startMs, endMs, durationMs, text }. Pick this when a machine reads the output next.

Using it as a podcast transcript API

Every format above is one HTTP call away. The More ways to use this tool section on this page has a ready-made curl: POST an episodeUrl and a format, get JSON back. Agents can call the same tool over MCP.

Through the API and MCP, episode, episodeTitle, video, videoTitle and transcript are always strings — transcript in whatever format you asked for, so JSON output arrives as a string containing JSON, not a nested array; parse it on your side. video and videoTitle are empty when the transcript didn't come from a YouTube video. details is the one exception: a real JSON object, not a string — { title, author, durationSeconds, trackLabel, languageName, languageCode, isAutomatic, cueCount, availableCodes }, the exact same shape YouTube to Text, Vimeo to Text and Dailymotion to Text return, with title and author carrying the Spotify episode's title and show name and durationSeconds its Spotify-listed length.

Languages

Both language settings live under Advanced, collapsed, because most people never need to touch them — they apply to whichever YouTube caption track gets read, exactly as on YouTube to Text. Leave Caption language on the default to let YouTube choose, preferring a human-written caption over an auto-generated one. Translate to asks YouTube to machine-translate the chosen track on the fly — YouTube's own translation, not ours.

What it can't do

• Episodes with no transcript to find. This is the common case for audio-only shows — a separate AI transcription tool, priced for the AI cost, is coming for exactly those.
• spotify.link short links. Open one in Spotify or a browser first, then paste the open.spotify.com/episode/... link it resolves to.
• Show, track, album, artist or playlist links. Paste a single episode's link — the tool tells you plainly which kind of link it saw instead.
• Videos with no captions at all, an age-restricted matched video, or a live stream — the same limits YouTube to Text has, since the actual transcript fetch is the same tool underneath.

What a run costs

Result	What you pay
Transcript returned	The credits shown on the run button
Matched video has no captions, is age-restricted, or was removed	1 credit
No transcript could be found for the episode	1 credit
Something went wrong on our end	Nothing — refunded in full

You're never charged for a failure that's ours. A definitive "nothing to find" answer keeps a single credit, because the lookup itself is real work — small enough to be negligible when you paste the wrong link, non-zero so a script can't run it for free.

Common questions

How do I get the transcript of a Spotify podcast episode? Paste the episode link at the top of this page and press the button. Works with open.spotify.com/episode/... links and spotify:episode:... URIs.

Why didn't it find a transcript for my episode? If the show doesn't publish its episodes anywhere with captions, there's genuinely nothing here to read, and the tool says so. If a run did find a YouTube video but the transcript looks wrong, check the video title under the player — it may not be the same episode.

Can I download a transcript as a text file? Yes — pick any format and use the download button on the result. Plain text and paragraphs save as .txt; SRT and WebVTT are ready to load straight into a player or editor.

Is there a free Spotify transcript API? The same tool is available over HTTP and MCP — see Using it as a podcast transcript API above. It draws from your account's normal credit allowance, so the free tier covers casual API use too.

Does it work for languages other than English? Yes, for whatever caption languages the matched YouTube video carries — pick one under Advanced, or let YouTube machine-translate the track into another language.

Related tools

• YouTube to Text — the transcript engine this tool runs on; use it directly when you already have the YouTube link.
• Dailymotion to Text and Vimeo to Text — the same "paste a link, get a transcript" tool for those platforms' own caption tracks.
• Text Summarizer — condense the transcript once you have it.