§ Paste a reel, read it as text
Every word, with its timecode.
Paste a public Instagram reel and get the full transcript — punctuated, with a timecode on every line. Free, no sign-up, five a day. Copy the whole thing in one press, or download it as a subtitle file. Some reels cannot be read at all, and the reason is below rather than buried.
§ What you get
Works with every public link shape: /reel/…, /reels/…, /p/… and the old /tv/…, with or without the tracking bits Instagram adds when you tap Copy link. A private account is not readable — we have no login and use nobody’s session.
The honest version of how it works
Instagram publishes no transcript file to take. A Facebook video can carry a subtitle track the uploader wrote, and where it does we lift it for free. A reel carries nothing of the kind — we checked the whole of what Instagram serves for a public reel and there is no subtitle track in it, in any format. The caption under the post is not one either: that is the description, the part with the hashtags and the link in the bio. It has no timecodes, and it is not a record of what was said.
So this listens instead. The audio goes through speech recognition, which means the text comes back with sentences in it — capitals, full stops, commas where the speaker paused — and every word carries the moment it was said, which is what makes the timecodes real rather than estimated.
It also means each transcript costs us a little compute, which is why the free ceiling is five reels a day per browser rather than unlimited. No account, no card, no email — the limit is the price.
When the uploader’s settings hold the video back
Some reels come back with everything except the video: who posted it, how long it is, what the caption says — and no file. That is the uploader’s copyright setting, applied by Instagram before anything reaches us.
Nothing on our side gets past it: not a retry, not a different network, not a browser extension. When it happens you are told in one sentence, straight away, and no credit is spent — but it does use one of your five for the day, because finding out meant asking Instagram. Every unreadable link here works that way.
We would rather put that on the page than let you find it after pasting. A tool that fails quietly is worse than one that says up front where it stops.
The name, the number, the address that was spoken and never put in the caption. In the transcript it is text you can select, search and paste.
Timecodes mean you can cite the moment rather than paraphrase it, whether you are writing a thread, a newsletter or a takedown.
On a train, in an office, or because watching ninety seconds for one fact is a bad trade.
Download the .srt and take it into your editor, so the next cut of your own video ships with captions instead of without.
Open the reel, tap Share then Copy link — or copy the address bar on desktop — and paste it in the box above. You get the text back with a timecode on every line, and you can copy it or download it as a subtitle file. There is nothing to install and no account to make. If your link looks like instagram.com/share/…, open it first and copy the address it lands on; those short share links resolve inside the app and cannot be read from outside it.
Five reels a day per browser, no account and no card. Reading a reel someone else already ran costs nothing and does not count against your five. Beyond that, come back tomorrow — nothing on this page is behind a paywall, and the rate card for the paid side is one page and has no asterisks.
No, and this is worth knowing before you start. Some reels are blocked by the uploader’s copyright settings: Instagram returns everything about the post except the video itself, so there is no audio for us to listen to. You will be told when you have hit one. Private accounts are also out — we have no login and use nobody’s session.
Not yet. This page reads reels; it does not cut them. What you take away from an Instagram link is the text — the whole transcript on your clipboard, or a timecoded .srt for your editor. If you want a vertical clip with captions burned in, the clipping side takes a YouTube link or a file you upload, on the home page.
Speech recognition, so: very good on clear speech, worse under loud music, crosstalk or a strong accent. Reels are a hard case for exactly that reason — the music is usually the point. Names and jargon are where it slips. Read before you publish.
English today. Other languages often work, but nothing about them is promised.
Up to ten minutes.
The text is cached against the public post, not against you, so the next person who pastes the same reel gets it free. What we hold about you is what counting the free five needs: an id in a cookie for this browser, a hashed IP, and a row saying a reel was read. No account is required — and if you make one, that row sits on the account. Full list in the privacy policy.
All three. TikTok and Facebook have pages of their own, and a YouTube link goes in on the home page — long videos are what the clipping is really for.