Practical guides
How to convert SRT or VTT subtitles to plain text
If you already have subtitles, you do not need to transcribe the recording again to get a text transcript. Subtitle to Text reads an SRT or VTT file and removes cue numbers, timestamps and markup. It is useful for turning caption files into reading material, interview notes or a draft document.
Convert subtitles to TXT in three steps
Use a UTF-8 subtitle file up to 2 MiB. Processing happens in your browser, and no speech model download is needed.
- Open Subtitle to Text. Choose your .srt or .vtt file, or paste its contents into the source field.
- Select Extract text and review the output. If a subtitle block is malformed, correct the source before exporting.
- Copy the result or download the .txt file. Keep the original subtitles if you will need the timecodes again.
An example of removing subtitle timestamps
Suppose your SRT file contains two caption blocks. The text export below keeps both captions, separated by a blank line. A line break within one caption stays a line break; it is not automatically turned into a paragraph.
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,000
Welcome to the workshop.
2
00:00:04,500 --> 00:00:07,000
Let’s begin.
→ Plain text:
Welcome to the workshop.
Let’s begin.What should you review in the transcript?
Read through sentence breaks and repeated lines before using the result as a document. Some caption exports repeat words across successive cues. This tool preserves those repetitions rather than guessing which words to delete.
Text extraction does not summarize, translate, correct names or invent speaker labels. Caption markup and its annotations are removed, so compare the result with the source if identifying speakers is important. You can edit the copied text in your document editor.
Only have a video or audio file?
Start with Video to Text to recognize the speech. Once transcription finishes, or after you stop and keep a partial result, review the words and select TXT for export. That workflow uses a local Whisper model; extracting words from an existing subtitle file does not.
A TXT transcript has no playback timing. Converting that text back to subtitles later would require adding timecodes again. For a project that needs both accessible video captions and meeting notes, keep an SRT or VTT export alongside the TXT version.