Video transcript

When to use this

Use it to turn a TikTok into text: repurpose a script, search what creators say, or feed it to an LLM. transcript is WEBVTT with timestamps (the same format other TikTok APIs return); text is the same words as plain text.

Transcripts come from TikTok's own captions: auto-generated speech captions (source: asr), the creator's own captions, or TikTok's translations. Most spoken videos have them. A video without captions (music only, or captions off) returns transcript: null with languages: [].

No captions? Pass use_ai_as_fallback=true and we transcribe the audio ourselves (source: ai) for videos up to 2 minutes. That costs 5 credits in total, and only when it runs; with captions it's still 1. If it hears no speech (music only), you get 404 transcript_unavailable for 1 credit, and that answer is cached.

By default you get the original language. Pass language (e.g. es) to pick one of languages.

Deleted, private and region-locked videos return 404 not_found.

Parameters

All parameters go in the query string.

Example request

Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your key, or set LURKAPI_KEY for the code. Get a free key.

curl "https://api.lurkapi.com/v1/tiktok/video/transcript?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tiktok.com%2F%40hubspot%2Fvideo%2F7671325437229845774" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

const params = new URLSearchParams({
  url: "https://www.tiktok.com/@hubspot/video/7671325437229845774",
});
const res = await fetch(`https://api.lurkapi.com/v1/tiktok/video/transcript?${params}`, {
  headers: { "x-api-key": process.env.LURKAPI_KEY },
});
const data = await res.json();
if (!data.success) throw new Error(`${data.code}: ${data.error}`);
console.log(data.languages);

import os
import requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://api.lurkapi.com/v1/tiktok/video/transcript",
    params={
        "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@hubspot/video/7671325437229845774",
    },
    headers={"x-api-key": os.environ["LURKAPI_KEY"]},
    timeout=60,
)
data = res.json()
if not data["success"]:
    raise RuntimeError(f"{data['code']}: {data['error']}")
print(data["languages"])

Example response

A real response from this endpoint, captured from the live API and trimmed to a couple of items. Strings over 96 characters (mostly signed media URLs) are cut short and end in ….

{
  "success": true,
  "credits_remaining": 99983,
  "credits_charged": 1,
  "id": "7671325437229845774",
  "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@hubspot/video/7671325437229845774",
  "languages": [
    {
      "language": "en",
      "source": "asr"
    }
  ],
  "transcript": "WEBVTT\n\n\n00:00:00.060 --> 00:00:02.400\nWhen your lead score came across …",
  "text": "When your lead score came across the threshold,\nI knew there was potenti…",
  "language": "en",
  "source": "asr"
}

Response fields

Every field of a successful response. [] marks a list: a[].b is the b of each item in a. nullable fields can be null; optional fields can be missing.

Caching and freshness

Responses are cached for up to 30 days, so a repeat call within that window can return the same data. It still costs 1 credit.

Errors

Errors return { success: false, error, code, docs } with the HTTP status below. Validation errors, 401/402/429 rejections and 5xx failures are free; not_found is charged (how charging works). All error codes.

Use it in Claude

Once LurkAPI is connected to Claude, this endpoint is the tiktok_transcript tool. Ask in plain English, for example:

Use LurkAPI's tiktok_transcript with url "https://www.tiktok.com/@hubspot/video/7671325437229845774" and summarize what you find.

Claude calls tiktok_transcript with arguments like these, and each call costs 1 credit; 5 if speech-to-text runs:

{
  "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@hubspot/video/7671325437229845774"
}

Tool results skip nulls and empty lists to save tokens.