A transcript is just the words, and the timings are the part worth having
A transcript is the words of a video as text, with or without timings. Here is what each way of getting one actually gives you, and what the timings are worth once you have them.
The honest version first
A transcript is the spoken words of a video written down. That is the whole definition. What varies is whether it carries timings, and that is the part that changes what you can do with it: without timings you have a document, and with them you can see how long a sentence held somebody before the next thing happened. Most people asking this question want to produce one, so here is what each route gives you.
Side by side
Prices in US dollars, read from each product's own page on 5 September 2026. Descript's page defaults to annual billing, so both its rates are shown.
| Dimension | What you get | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Type it yourself | The words, no timings, and complete accuracy if you are careful | Roughly four to six times the length of the video |
| Instagram or TikTok auto-captions | The words burned onto the video as captions, generated automatically | Free, inside the app, on your own video |
| Descript | A timed transcript you edit as text, and editing the text edits the video | Hobbyist, $24 a month or $16 billed annually, 10 media hours a month |
| Descript, higher tier | The same, with more hours and 4K export | Creator, $35 a month or $24 billed annually, 30 media hours a month |
| Scrptly | A timed transcript of a Reel that already performed, plus where the hook ends and what the structure was | 2 analyses free for the account's lifetime, then $19 a month |
What the search data says
Across the 1,555 keywords we have priced against Google Ads, instructional phrasing accounts for 5.8 percent of demand: 41,984 searches a month out of 727,446. On this topic it is 99.8 percent. Of the 4,340 monthly searches about video transcripts, 4,330 ask how to write one or what one is, and the single largest term at 3,600 a month is how to write a transcript of a video.
That is one of the highest instructional shares on our whole board, seventeen times the average. This is a question, not a purchase, which is why the table above starts with typing it yourself rather than with a product.
Sample of 1555 keywords, measured on 2026-09-05. Google Ads Keyword Planner volumes via DataForSEO, United States, held in our own keyword database.
Which one to open first
- Decide first whether you need timings. For subtitles or a blog post the plain words are enough, and you can type them faster than you can evaluate a tool.
- If you need timings, use a transcript tool rather than typing timecodes by hand. That is the only part of this job where software clearly wins.
- If the reason you want a transcript is to work out why somebody else's video held people, the words alone will not tell you. Scrptly returns the transcript with the point where the hook ends, which is the number that actually answers it.