How to Get a Transcript off a YouTube Video

​Youtube is now the world's largest video hub, including music videos, conferences, and of course, your every day shennanigans.

If you've embarked on a self-learning journey, you're likely to want to do more than just watch or even listen to a video while you go about your day. While Youtube has introduced transcripts and captions to make content more accessible, you're likely to want to do more than just that.

Enter Mindstone and the magic of highlights.

With Mindstone, you can easily get a transcript of any video, read it back as you watch, and take notes and highlights on insights to save for later. It's no coincidence we decided to do just that with August Bradley's conference talk at Second Brain Summit.

Let's take a look at how to do this!

Table of Contents

• What is Mindstone?
• Creating a Mindstone account
• Saving Youtube videos into Mindstone
• Transcribe videos with Mindstone
  
• Take notes and save highlights on Youtube videos
  

What is Mindstone?

Mindstone is a learning platform with a unique focus to help you manage information overload. Designed as a digital library, you can save any online content, including articles, images, PDFs, videos and podcasts to look at later.

Based on your own personal learning goals and with the use of AI, Mindstone will help you optimize your learning time and focus on the next best thing to tackle next.

With the use of an AI coach, as well as note-taking, highlights, and smart tags, you can dive deeper into topics, save insights, and even discuss those insights with friends and colleagues to tap into social learning. It's almost like having a second brain you can tap into at any moment - but it actually keeps you motivated to keep learning.

Creating a Mindstone account

You have two options to use Mindstone: via web or via the mobile app. Regardless of which method you choose, you will be able to use them interchangeably with the same account login details.

To open an account via web, simply go to the Mindstone website and click on 'Get Started.' The next thing to do is to install the browser extension.

Browser extension

We have browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge and in browsers that support Chrome extensions such as Brave.

To add the Mindstone extension to your browser go to Get the Mindstone Extension.

👉 You must have the extension pinned to your toolbar 👈

Below is an example for Chrome

Mobile app

You can download the mobile app from either the App Store or Play Store. Once installed, follow the onboarding flow to create your account.

The Mindstone mobile app has a share extension that makes it easy to save to Mindstone from apps that use the native share menu.

To enable the Share Extension, follow these steps:

1. Tap on the Share button in your phone's browser.
2. Click on the "More" option to see all apps on your device.
3. Find Mindstone and add it to your favorites list.

Saving Youtube videos into Mindstone

Once you have the web app and mobile apps installed, saving Youtube videos is a breeze!

Let's go back to our original video of August Bradley's talk on Systems Thinking for the Second Brain Summit.

When browsing on web, simply click on the Mindstone extension at the top right and we'll send it straight into Mindstone. Same with the mobile app - click on the share extension and voila!

Transcribe videos with Mindstone

Once the video has been saved to Mindstone, it'll take anywhere between a few instant seconds to a few minutes to get the transcription back. We can't promise it'll always happen in a flash, but for the most part, you shouldn't have to wait too long!

Transcriptions will all show text alongside their specific timecode, so you can follow the video with ease.

Take notes and save highlights on Youtube videos​

As you watch the video and come up with any interesting points you'd like to keep or annotate on, simply highlight the section and use any of the highlight colors.

You can also take notes and save those insights. All notes and highlights can be easily references at any time, so if you want a refresher!

Bonus: Use ChatGPT as your AI learning coach

Of course saving highlights and notes isn't the end of what Mindstone can do.

Once you highlight a section, you can also use ChatGPT to dive deeper into the content with an AI coach.

The AI coach will prompt a few questions to help you get started.

The AI's insights can also be saved as notes, so you don't have to worry about missing out on anything.

Waste no time and get started with Mindstone!