Feature
VidNotes uses advanced speech-to-text models to convert any video into a searchable, timestamped transcript. Whether you are working with a lecture recording, a Zoom meeting, a YouTube tutorial, or a local video file, VidNotes delivers accurate results in seconds. The transcription engine handles diverse accents, technical jargon, fast speakers, and background noise, adapting automatically to the audio quality of your source material. For example, a 90-minute university lecture recorded on a phone in a large hall with echo and ambient noise will still produce a reliable transcript that captures technical terminology correctly. VidNotes processes the audio through OpenAI's Whisper model via AIProxy, which has been trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio data, giving it broad coverage of accents, dialects, and domain-specific vocabulary across fields like medicine, law, and engineering.
Paste a YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or Vimeo link directly into VidNotes on iOS, the web app at app.vidnotes.app, or use the Chrome extension for instant YouTube transcription. You can also upload video files from your device, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox. VidNotes accepts all common video formats including MP4, MOV, M4V, and AVI. On iOS, the import system uses native file browsing with full cloud storage integration. On the web, drag and drop or paste any video URL.
VidNotes extracts the audio track using AVFoundation and converts it to an optimized M4A format stored in the app's Documents/Audio directory before sending it through the Whisper transcription engine via AIProxy. The engine returns a segmented transcript with precise timestamps for each passage. For YouTube videos with existing captions, VidNotes pulls those directly through the VidNavigator API for near-instant results, typically completing in under 3 seconds regardless of video length.
Browse the transcript in segmented or full-text mode. Tap any timestamp to jump to that exact moment in the video with time-synced playback. Search within the transcript to find specific words or phrases instantly. The segmented view shows each passage as a separate block with its own timestamp, making it easy to scan through a long video and locate the section you need without scrubbing through a timeline manually.
Students
Record lectures and get a complete, searchable transcript instead of scrambling to take notes by hand. Review specific sections before exams by searching for key terms and jumping directly to the relevant timestamps, turning a two-hour lecture into targeted five-minute review sessions.
Journalists
Transcribe interviews accurately and search for specific quotes without replaying hours of audio. Export timestamped transcripts to reference exact moments when fact-checking or writing stories, and handle sources speaking in any of 30+ supported languages without separate translation tools.
Meeting organizers
Turn recorded meetings into written records so no decision or action item gets lost. Share searchable transcripts with attendees who missed the meeting, and combine with the action items feature to automatically extract commitments and deadlines from the conversation.
VidNotes processes local videos by extracting the audio track using AVFoundation and converting it to an optimized M4A format before sending it to the Whisper transcription engine through AIProxy. The audio extraction pipeline handles videos with multiple audio tracks, selects the primary track automatically, and compresses it for efficient upload without losing speech clarity. This means you get clean, accurate results even from videos with complex audio tracks, background music, or variable recording quality.
For YouTube and social media videos, VidNotes first checks for existing captions through its VidNavigator API integration. When captions are available, you get results almost instantly, typically within 2-3 seconds regardless of video length. When captions are unavailable, VidNotes falls back to a secondary RapidAPI integration for an alternative caption source. As a final fallback, the video is processed through the full Whisper transcription pipeline with the same accuracy you get from local files. This three-tier approach maximizes both speed and reliability.
Every transcript is stored locally on your device using SwiftData, making it instantly searchable and available offline. You own your data and can export or delete it at any time. The SwiftData schema links each transcript to its source video through a VideoProject entity, preserving metadata like duration, source type, and thumbnail. Transcript segments are stored as individual entities with their own timestamps, enabling the tap-to-jump navigation and granular search functionality.
No account required. Paste a video link and see it in action.