TranscriptAPI is a YouTube transcript API. Spoken is a podcast transcript API. If you landed here trying to pull podcast transcripts out of TranscriptAPI, that is the whole answer — but the detail is worth two minutes.
Last updated August 2026
These are not alternatives to each other — they cover different libraries. TranscriptAPI serves YouTube: video transcripts, channel browsing, playlist extraction, YouTube search. Spoken serves podcasts, returning the transcript published with an episode as Markdown with real speaker names. Neither one can do the other's job, so the question is almost never "which is better" — it is "which library is your content in".
| TranscriptAPI | Spoken | |
|---|---|---|
| Library covered | YouTube | Podcasts |
| Podcast episodes | Not covered | The entire product |
| YouTube videos | The entire product | Not covered |
| Speaker names | No speaker identification | Real names, resolved per turn |
| Output format | JSON segments | Markdown, speakers bold, timestamps per turn |
| Billing model | Monthly subscription | One-time credit packs |
| Credits if you stop paying | Paused until you renew | Yours — they never expire |
| Re-fetching an item | Costs a credit each time | Free, always |
Plenty of large podcasts also post full episodes to YouTube, which makes it reasonable to assume a YouTube transcript API covers podcasts by proxy. In practice it covers whichever episodes a show chose to upload, under YouTube's captions rather than the transcript published with the episode, and without any speaker attribution.
For a show that publishes to both, that is a real difference in the artifact you get back: auto-captions are a single undifferentiated stream, where a published podcast transcript carries turn boundaries — and Spoken resolves those turns to actual names. For a show that doesn't post to YouTube, there is no overlap at all.
If your pipeline covers both libraries, use both — they sit side by side without overlapping, and neither is a substitute for the other.
No. It is a YouTube API — transcripts, search, channels and playlists, all scoped to YouTube. For podcast episodes you need a podcast transcript API.
Only for shows that upload full episodes there, and what you get is YouTube's captions rather than the transcript published with the episode — a single stream with no speaker attribution. Spoken returns the published transcript with speakers resolved to real names.
There is no speaker-identification feature in the product. Spoken resolves speakers to real names as part of the response.
Never. Spoken sells one-time packs rather than a subscription, so there is no renewal date between you and credits you have already bought, and re-fetching an episode you already pulled costs nothing.
Yes, and if you index both libraries that is the normal setup. They cover different content, so there is nothing to reconcile between them.
TL;DR: Not competitors — different libraries. TranscriptAPI for YouTube, Spoken for podcasts. If you need both, run both.
Thousands of transcripts fetched by developers building summarizers, RAG pipelines, and podcast tools