Watch To Text is a web-based tool that generates text transcripts from YouTube videos. Users paste a YouTube link or video ID into the site, and the tool retrieves the caption track attached to that video. The resulting transcript is displayed line by line with timestamps. Users can copy the full text or download it as a TXT file for reading, or as SRT or VTT files for use with video timelines. The service is free and does not require registration. The tool does not play the video or listen to its soundtrack. It requests the caption tracks already associated with the video from YouTube and selects one to display. If a video has no caption track, the tool cannot produce a transcript. Automatic tracks are generated by YouTube's speech recognition and may vary in quality depending on pronunciation, accents, dialects, or background noise. Uploaded tracks are written by the creator. In tests conducted on 17 September 2026, automatic tracks were marked "asr" and named "auto-generated," while uploaded tracks were not. Region-based differences were not reproduced in testing, and music-heavy videos still produced automatic captions, though with noise such as "[Music]" tags and repeated phrases. Typical use cases include revisiting lectures or detailed explanations without scanning through the video timeline, incorporating text from one's own videos into writing and editing workflows, reading conversations at one's own pace, and keeping passages for later reference. For videos that already exist as files on a computer, the site offers a separate page for converting MP4 files to transcripts. Users can also upload their own audio or video files for speech recognition, with a maximum duration of 20 minutes and support for MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4, MOV, and WebM formats.