Read any YouTube video — timestamped, on your Mac
Paste a link. Player on the left, timestamped transcript on the right, kept in sync. Captions load instantly; nothing is uploaded.
Download for MacPaste, read, click to seek
Instant captions
Drop a URL and read a scrollable, timestamped transcript in seconds — before any audio is processed.
Click any line
The player jumps to that moment; a floating play button follows your scroll so you always start “from here”.
Speaker labels on demand
One button runs the on-device pipeline — Parakeet-TDT plus diarization — for a speaker-labelled transcript.
Not just another transcript site
Most online tools post a URL to a server and hand back plain text. Vocateca is a native macOS app built for working with a lot of audio.
| Vocateca | Typical online tools | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | On your Mac — URL and audio never leave it | Server-side — your link and audio hit their servers |
| Timestamps | Core: every segment timed, click to seek | Often optional or plain-text only |
| Speaker labels | Yes — on-device diarization, carried into CSV | Rare |
| No captions? | Falls back to real on-device transcription | Usually fails — captions only |
| Auto-caption cleanup | Collapses YouTube's rolling-window duplicate lines into clean, correctly-timed segments | Paste raw — every line repeated |
| Export formats | md, txt, srt, vtt, csv, json, okf | Plain text, sometimes SRT |
| Beyond one video | Playlists, channel subscribe, auto-download | One video at a time |
| Automation | Built-in CLI + MCP transcript command | Web UI or a paid API |
What we leave out, on purpose: No cloud chat, no server API, no AI summaries — off-model for a native, private app. Vocateca does one job well: clean, structured text out of the audio you follow.
More than a single video
Every format, speakers included
Subtitles as VTT/SRT, structured segments as CSV/JSON, LLM-ready Markdown. CSV carries a speaker column when diarized on-device.
All export formats →Playlists, channels, daemon
Paste a playlist or a CSV of links to transcribe in bulk — or subscribe to a channel and let a daily daemon do it.
On-device, no account
Captions from YouTube, transcription local on Apple Silicon, transcript stays on your Mac unless you export it.
How privacy works →Send a video from YouTube in one click
Install the Vocateca browser extension and a small transcript button appears under every YouTube video. Click it and the video is sent straight to the Vocateca app on your Mac, which extracts the transcript for you — no copy-paste.
One click
A transcript button sits right next to Like and Share on every watch page.
Straight to the app
The link opens in the running Vocateca app — the extension itself sends nothing to any server.
You choose
Open the transcript right away, or silently queue it without leaving your browser.
Scriptable, and usable by AI agents
The same extraction is a command-line tool and — automatically — an MCP tool your AI assistant can call.
Vocateca's MCP server is derived from its CLI, so transcript shows up as a tool in Claude with no extra setup.
See LLM workflows →Extract a timestamped transcript
$ vocateca transcript "https://youtube.com/watch?v=…" --format vtt
WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.120
Hello and welcome
…