Facebook Transcript — Paste a Video, Get the Words

Paste any Facebook video link — feed posts, Watch episodes, Reels, Live replays, group videos — and get a verbatim transcript in the spoken language, a summary in yours, and a downloadable file. No settings menu, no language compromise, no fighting with Facebook's auto-captions.

This skill turns Facebook speech into searchable, quotable, translatable text. It works with any public Facebook video in any language, supports plain text / timestamped Markdown / SRT subtitle output, and the format is selected automatically from how you phrase the request — not from a settings page.

Who it's for

• Page admins and community managers repurposing long Facebook Lives into shorter clips, blog posts, or email newsletters — pull the spoken script out as text in seconds
• Social media managers localizing Facebook campaigns for international markets — verbatim transcripts preserve exactly what was said, ready for accurate translation by humans or LLMs
• Marketers and competitive researchers analyzing competitor Facebook ads, brand videos, and Watch series — read the talking points, capture the hooks, study the openings without sitting through hours of video
• Journalists and fact-checkers quoting from Facebook videos, public statements, livestreamed press conferences, and political content — the transcript is verbatim, never rewritten, so the quote you cite is the quote that was said
• Researchers and academics studying Facebook content for media analysis, public discourse research, or social science — exportable text for coding, NVivo, Atlas.ti, and other qualitative analysis tools
• Event organizers and webinar hosts turning a 90-minute Facebook Live into show notes, blog recaps, LinkedIn posts, or follow-up emails for attendees
• Group admins archiving valuable discussions, AMAs, and recorded calls from private group spaces (when accessible)
• Pastors, educators, and nonprofit leaders transcribing sermons, lectures, fundraising appeals, and community broadcasts for those who couldn't attend live
• Accessibility teams generating SRT subtitle files for hearing-impaired audiences when re-uploading content to other platforms
• Language learners using native-speaker Facebook content as study material — verbatim transcripts paired with translated summaries
• Anyone watching with sound off — at the office, on the train, in a quiet room with someone sleeping nearby

What it solves

Facebook hosts an enormous amount of long-form spoken content — Lives, Watch episodes, recorded interviews, sermons, webinars, town halls, group discussions — but the platform makes it remarkably hard to get the words out as usable text.

Facebook's auto-captions exist but are inconsistent, unreliable on accents and noisy audio, and not exportable in any sensible format. The "download captions" workflow is buried, region-dependent, and often missing entirely. Watching at 2x to take notes still costs you 45 minutes for a 90-minute Live. Third-party transcribers exist but most fail in one of three ways:

• They translate the transcript when they shouldn't. You wanted to quote a Spanish-speaking creator verbatim. The tool returned an English paraphrase. The quote is gone, and you can't cite a paraphrase in journalism, research, or legal work.
• They leave the summary in the source language. You don't read Tagalog. The summary came back in Tagalog. Now you need a second tool to translate it.
• They hide everything behind a settings menu. You just wanted to paste a link and type a sentence. Instead you're configuring API keys, output paths, and toggles.

The shared problem: these tools optimize for the engineer building the workflow, not the page admin, marketer, journalist, or researcher trying to get a job done in 30 seconds.

This skill takes a link and a sentence. It returns the right thing.

What makes it different

1. Two-language output, by default.

Transcript stays verbatim in the source audio language — your quote is intact, word-for-word, exactly as the speaker said it. Summary and key points come back in your conversation language. A Spanish Live transcribed by an English-speaking user gets a Spanish transcript and an English summary. A Tagalog sermon transcribed by a Mandarin-speaking user gets a Tagalog transcript and a Mandarin summary. No toggle to flip, no language argument to remember. The dual-language output is the default because it's what the use case actually demands — accurate quotation in one language, scannable comprehension in another.

2. Output format from phrasing, not from a menu.

Say "give me subtitles" → you get SRT, ready to drop into Premiere, CapCut, DaVinci Resolve, or YouTube Studio. Say "with timestamps so I can find the quote" → you get Markdown with [MM:SS] paragraph prefixes. Say nothing format-specific → you get clean plain text, easiest to read and quote from. The keyword scan reads any position, any inflection, across English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — "字幕," "タイムスタンプ," "자막" all trigger the same routing as their English counterparts. There is no settings page. There is no format dropdown. The interface is the sentence you would have written anyway.

3. Fast on long content — even a 3-hour Facebook Live.

Facebook Lives, town halls, sermons, and Watch episodes routinely run an hour or more — the longest content on social media. Most AI transcribers feed the full transcript into the summary model before producing output, which puts the summary 60–120 seconds further away on a long video, and several minutes further away on a multi-hour broadcast. This skill writes a sidecar digest — each paragraph's first and last sentence — and summarizes from that. Half the input tokens, the same summary quality, and on long content the user-facing wait drops from "five-minute wait for a wall of text" to "under two minutes for a clean summary plus a saved file." The full verbatim transcript still saves to disk; the digest is a behind-the-scenes optimization the user never has to think about.

Supported Facebook content

Examples

Example 1 — Repurposing a Facebook Live into a blog post

A small business owner ran a 75-minute Facebook Live answering customer questions about a new product. They want to turn it into a blog post and an email newsletter without re-watching the whole thing.

"Transcribe this Facebook Live https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=123456789 and pull out the part where they explain the pricing tiers."

What comes back:

• The pricing-tier explanation first — a 1–3 sentence verbatim excerpt, so the owner can quote the founder's exact phrasing in the blog post
• A 2–4 sentence summary and 3–6 key points covering the major themes of the Live
• The full verbatim transcript saved to a downloadable .txt file, ready to paste into a Google Doc, edit down, and turn into article copy

Example 2 — Quoting a public statement for journalism

A reporter is covering a story and needs to cite something a public figure said in a Facebook video. Accuracy is non-negotiable — a paraphrase isn't usable.

"What did the speaker say about the budget proposal? https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=987654321"

What comes back:

• A specific-quote answer first — the verbatim sentences where the budget proposal was discussed, with surrounding context for accurate attribution
• A short summary of the broader video for editorial context
• The full verbatim transcript saved to a file, citable line-by-line

Example 3 — Subtitling a sermon for cross-platform sharing

A church wants to upload last Sunday's sermon (recorded as a Facebook Live) to YouTube with proper captions for accessibility.

"Give me SRT subtitles for this sermon https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=555666777"

What comes back:

• An .srt file in standard SubRip format with proper timecodes — drop straight into YouTube Studio's subtitle uploader, CapCut, or any video editor
• A short summary and key points for the video description and church newsletter

Output formats

Language support

The transcription engine handles English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Indonesian, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Russian, Turkish, and most major European and Asian languages — including languages where Facebook has its largest non-English audiences. Mixed-language videos (a speaker code-switching between English and Spanish, for instance) are transcribed with the dominant language as the base; the verbatim text preserves both languages as spoken.

You don't have to specify the language. URL signals and page handle clues drive automatic detection. If the first attempt comes back empty, the skill retries once in your conversation language. After two empty attempts, you'll be asked to confirm — usually the video is private, age-restricted, region-locked, or removed rather than a language miss.

If you already know the audio language, mentioning it in the prompt ("this Spanish-language Live," "the audio is in Tagalog") skips the detection step and saves a few seconds.

Accuracy and what to expect

The transcript is verbatim — produced by a speech-recognition pipeline, never rewritten or paraphrased. Filler words, repetitions, hesitations, and crosstalk are preserved as spoken. This matters when you're quoting for journalism, research, legal contexts, or fact-checking — exact wording is evidence.

Accuracy is high on clear single-speaker audio in supported languages. Multi-speaker conversations, heavy background music, crosstalk in panel discussions, strong regional accents, low-quality phone audio in older Lives, and severely compressed audio reduce accuracy — there's no AI fix for an unintelligible source. If a section comes back garbled, it's usually a signal that the audio itself is hard to hear, not that the model failed. For high-stakes citation work (journalism, academic research, legal), spot-check critical quotes against the source video.

The skill processes the public video link only. It does not log into Facebook and does not access private content.

Out of scope

• Local video files on disk — .mp4 exports from Facebook, screen recordings, files saved to your computer — use the related audio-to-text skill for those instead
• Active Live broadcasts — only finished recordings work; ongoing Lives return empty until the broadcast ends and is saved to the page or profile
• Image-only posts and silent videos — no audio means nothing to transcribe
• Private profiles and closed groups — the link must be publicly accessible; the skill cannot authenticate into Facebook on your behalf
• Facebook Stories — 24-hour ephemeral content; URL access is unreliable and the skill is not optimized for the format
• Translation of the transcript itself — the transcript intentionally stays in the source language to preserve the verbatim quote; if you need it translated, ask for translation as a follow-up step after receiving the verbatim text