How to Fetch YouTube Transcripts for AI Summarization and RAG

If you're building AI apps that summarize YouTube videos, power RAG over video content, or generate subtitles, you need reliable transcript text — not browser scraping that breaks every other week.

This guide shows a simple REST approach that returns JSON with timestamps, plain text, or raw timed cues.

Why transcripts matter for AI

Summarization — feed transcript text to GPT/Claude instead of sending video

RAG — chunk timed cues into a vector database for semantic search