Grabbing a transcript of a short snippet of a YouTube video with MacWhisper#

I grabbed a quote from a transcript of a snippet of a YouTube video today for my blog.

I use the MacWhisper macOS desktop app to run Whisper. It’s a very pleasant GUI wrapper around the Whisper transcription model.

Usually I pull a full YouTube video using yt-dlp and then drop the resulting .mp4 file into MacWhisper to transcribe the whole thing.

Today I realized there’s a faster way if I just want a transcript of a few minutes from the video:

1. Open MacWhisper
2. Hit the “New Recording” button and then “Start Recording”
3. Hit “Play” on the YouTube video
4. Wait until the end of the snippet and hit “Stop Recording” in MacWhisper
5. Hit “Transcribe Reporting” and wait a few seconds or minutes depending on the length of the snippet

Once the transcription is done you can hit the “Copy” button to copy out the text - I then usually drop it into VS Code to make a few minor edits.

Here’s a GIF of the whole process: