Send YouTube Transcripts to Anthropic API
Get any YouTube transcript into Claude in seconds
Or just change youtube.com to 2outube.com in your browser
Swap 'youtube.com' for '2outube.com' in any video URL to instantly get the full transcript. Copy it, then pass it to the Anthropic API as a user message so Claude can summarize, analyze, or extract insights from the video.
The Trick
youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
2outube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
Just change 'y' to '2'
Works with any YouTube video that has captions
Using Transcripts with the Anthropic API
Get the transcript from 2outube
Take any YouTube video URL and replace 'youtube.com' with '2outube.com'. The page loads instantly with the full plain-text transcript — no login, no extension, no copy-paste box needed.
Copy the transcript text
Select all the transcript text on the 2outube page and copy it. The text is clean, readable prose — not timestamped chunks — making it ideal for passing directly to a language model.
Build your Anthropic API request
In your API call to claude-sonnet-4-6 (or any Claude model), place the transcript in the 'user' message content. Prepend a brief instruction such as 'Here is a YouTube transcript:' followed by the full text, then append your actual prompt (e.g., 'Summarize the key points.').
Receive Claude's structured response
The Anthropic API returns Claude's analysis of the video content. Use the response in your app, pipeline, or notebook — for tasks like summarization, Q&A, topic extraction, sentiment analysis, or generating structured JSON from unstructured video content.
Quick Start
Get the transcript
Navigate to a YouTube video you want to analyze and note its URL.
Change youtube to 2outube
In the address bar, change 'youtube.com' to '2outube.com' and press Enter. The transcript appears immediately on the page.
Paste transcript into your Anthropic API call
Copy the transcript text and include it as the user message content in your Anthropic API request. Pair it with a system prompt or inline instruction to tell Claude what to do with it.
Ready-Made Template
import anthropic
# 1. Get transcript from 2outube (paste text below)
transcript = """
PASTE_TRANSCRIPT_HERE
"""
client = anthropic.Anthropic() # uses ANTHROPIC_API_KEY env var
message = client.messages.create(
model="claude-sonnet-4-6",
max_tokens=1024,
messages=[
{
"role": "user",
"content": f"Here is a YouTube video transcript:\n\n{transcript}\n\nPlease summarize the key points in bullet format, identify the main topic, and extract any actionable advice mentioned."
}
]
)
print(message.content[0].text)Questions
Does this work with any YouTube video?
Yes, any video with captions.
Is it really free?
Completely free. No account, no limits.
Which Claude models can I use with YouTube transcripts via the Anthropic API?
Any Claude model available through the Anthropic API works — including claude-opus-4-6, claude-sonnet-4-6, and claude-haiku-4-5. For most transcript analysis tasks, Sonnet offers the best balance of speed, cost, and quality. Use Haiku for high-volume pipelines where cost matters.
How long can a YouTube transcript be before it hits Claude's context limit?
Claude's context window supports up to 200,000 tokens, which covers roughly 150,000 words of text. Most YouTube transcripts — even multi-hour videos — fall well within this limit. A one-hour video transcript is typically 8,000–12,000 words.
Can I process multiple YouTube transcripts in one Anthropic API call?
Yes. Because Claude's context window is large, you can concatenate several transcripts into a single user message — separated by clear delimiters — and ask Claude to compare, contrast, or synthesize across all of them in one request.
What's the best system prompt for analyzing YouTube transcripts with Claude?
A clear, task-specific system prompt works best. For example: 'You are a research assistant. When given a video transcript, extract the main thesis, supporting arguments, key quotes, and any data or statistics mentioned. Respond in structured JSON.' Tailor the instruction to your use case — summarization, Q&A, sentiment, or data extraction.
Do I need an Anthropic API key to use this workflow?
You need an Anthropic API key to call the Claude API in your own code. Getting the transcript from 2outube is completely free and requires no key. Sign up at console.anthropic.com to get an API key — new accounts receive free credits to start.
Can I automate this workflow to process YouTube transcripts programmatically?
Yes. You can fetch the transcript by making an HTTP request to 2outube.com with the video ID, parse the transcript text from the response, then pass it to the Anthropic API in the same script. This makes it easy to build pipelines that automatically summarize or analyze batches of YouTube videos.
Try it now — paste a YouTube URL and get the transcript in seconds
Free, no signup required
Try It Free