How to get a transcript of a Facebook video
Facebook can show captions but has no transcript to copy. How to turn a public Facebook video or Reel into text, what to do with your own, and why links fail.
Facebook can show captions but has no transcript to copy. How to turn a public Facebook video or Reel into text, what to do with your own, and why links fail.
A shop posts its new opening hours as a video. A teacher shares a lesson on a Page. A group posts a talk you want to quote. Facebook will show you the video, and sometimes captions, but not the words as text you can copy. Here is what Facebook offers, how to get a transcript from the link, and what to do when the video is your own.
For viewers: captions, when the video has them. On a computer, Facebook's settings have an option to always show captions on videos where they exist (Facebook Help). On an iPhone the switch is in the phone's own accessibility settings. Facebook's help page notes that some videos have no captions. Where they exist, they play a line at a time over the video. There is no panel with the whole text.
For the owner: a caption file. Facebook's help page for adding captions describes uploading a SubRip (.srt) file to a published video, one file per language (Facebook Help). So if you want captions on your own video, you need the .srt first.
Neither gives a viewer the transcript.
Three videos a day up to 3 minutes are free without an account; after that it is 3 credits a minute, for videos up to 10 minutes. The audio is fetched from the public post, transcribed and thrown away. You never download the video.
We tested the page with a 29-second update from a neighbourhood bakery. We wrote the script, a text-to-speech voice read it, and Whisper large v3 transcribed it on October 31, 2026. All 89 words came back right. The lines came back like this:
Look at the numbers. "Seven", "eight", "four" and "the twelfth" came back as digits. "Two hours, eight places" a few seconds later stayed as words. The same clip used both styles, so if you need a consistent style, fix the numbers by hand.
That was one clean voice with no music. On real posts, with music, noise or people talking over each other, expect more mistakes. How accurate is AI transcription? shows what we measured across 28 clips, and what we have not tested.
Facebook shows a login wall to some requests, even for public posts. When that happens the tool reports the video as private and charges nothing. Things to try:
If the goal is captions on a video you posted, work from the file you already have. Upload it to the subtitle generator, read the text against the video, fix names and numbers, and download the .srt. Then add it to the published video as Facebook's help page describes. Captions you check yourself are better than ones nobody read.
A transcript of somebody else's video is for reading, notes and quoting with credit. The words stay theirs.