Extract YouTube & TikTok Transcripts with Apify (n8n Workflow)

Turn YouTube and TikTok links into clean transcripts—automatically with Apify in n8n

This n8n workflow extracts transcripts from a mixed list of YouTube and TikTok videos using Apify Actors, then outputs one consistent, cleaned result per video (title, author, word count, and transcript text) for your next step—like storage or summarization.

What this workflow does

• Runs on manual execution (Manual Trigger) when you start the workflow.
• Accepts a mixed array of video URLs (YouTube and TikTok) that you define in the links step.
• Splits URLs by platform and prepares batched Apify Actor runs for YouTube and TikTok separately.
• Calls the Apify API synchronously to run the relevant Actors and retrieves transcript dataset items.
• Uses AI transcription fallback for YouTube when captions are missing.
• Normalizes results into one consistent output per video, including: status, url, title, author, source, wordCount, and transcript (or an error/no-transcript result).

Use cases

• Content research pipelines: pull transcripts for competitor videos and analyze themes.
• Knowledge base building: store transcripts in a database or spreadsheet for later querying.
• Automated summarization workflows: feed cleaned transcript text directly into an AI summarization node.
• Ops for SaaS teams: ingest creator or support-video content to improve documentation.

Technical details

• Auth: configure an Apify API token as an HTTP Header Auth credential using Authorization: Bearer <token>.
• n8n nodes / components: set, code, sticky note, http request, manual trigger.
• Apify integration: invokes Apify Actors and retrieves transcript dataset items, returning normalized fields per video.

Want a reliable, SEO-friendly way to extract YouTube/TikTok transcripts in your n8n automation? This Apify-powered workflow is designed to make it straightforward.