I’ve just updated the Chrome extension so that if you use it from within a YouTube video page on desktop, it will attempt to extract the transcript and create a Readlang text with synced video using YouTube’s transcript and timings. If there is no transcript for that particular video on YouTube, or if Google has updated the YouTube webpage so that it doesn’t work anymore, you may see an error message instead saying that the transcript couldn’t be extracted.
To use this:
- Install the Readlang Web Reader Chrome extension
- Navigate to a YouTube video (URL must be in format
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxxxx) - Either right click somewhere on the page and select “Import to Readlang”, or click the “R” button to open the Web Reader and then select “Import to Readlang” from the menu.
If you already have the extension installed and it doesn’t work, it could be because the update hasn’t been rolled out to you yet, but it should do within the next 24 hours. The latest update has version number 0.9.11.
Note that the way this import works is brittle and may stop working at any time if Google update how the YouTube website works. If that happens let me know and I’ll try to fix it, but I can’t offer any guarantees.
Many of the transcripts on YouTube are of bad quality. If you find that this is the case, you can open the Edit tab of the reader page sidebar and fix the transcript yourself. Readlang will do its best to keep the sync points intact.