shrybe
paste the reel. i'll write down what they said.

That reel,
in words.

Paste an Instagram reel or post link and get the spoken words back as timestamped text. No app, no account, no watermark — and nothing to install on your phone.

· audio or video, up to 100 MB

auto often misreads Slavic — pick if it gets it wrong
Reels and postspublic ones, no login
Text you can use.txt, .srt and .vtt

What comes back

Paragraphs, one per segment the model hears, each stamped with the second it starts at. You can scrub to a moment, lift a quote with its timecode attached, or export the lot. Plain .txt keeps the timings inline; .srt and .vtt hand you the same words as a subtitle file, ready to drop into an editor.

The engine is OpenAI Whisper on the large-v3-turbo checkpoint, and language is detected rather than declared — 100 of them. Worth knowing before you trust the output: accuracy is not uniform across languages. It follows how much of each language the model was trained on, and the gap between the best-served and the worst-served is wider than people expect. We went through the per-language picture in how accurate Whisper actually is.

Which links work, and which genuinely cannot

Captions on the screen are not a transcript

Plenty of reels arrive with words already burnt across the video, which raises a fair question: why bother. The answer is that those words are pixels. You cannot search them, select them, paste them into a document, or hand them to anyone who needs the script. They were styled to be watched, not to be used.

A transcript is the opposite: text with timings attached, which is also exactly what a subtitle file is made of. That is why the same job that gives you something quotable also gives you an .srt you can load into an editor. One pass, two uses.

Reels are short, and that changes which limit matters

The free tier stops at 75 minutes of audio per transcript. For a podcast episode that ceiling is the thing you check first; for a reel it is irrelevant, because a reel is measured in seconds. What actually binds here is the other number: fifteen transcripts a day from one address.

That is deliberate rather than stingy. Fifteen is enough to work through a morning's worth of saved reels, and small enough that the tier can stay free with no account behind it. If you are working through a batch, you can hand over three links at once instead of pasting them one after another.

Speed depends on what else is running. A short reel is quick on its own — the audio is seconds long — but you are sharing the machines with everyone else, so a busy hour adds waiting. When something is ahead of you the page shows your place in the queue rather than pretending nothing is happening.

When Instagram says nothing back

One failure is worth knowing about because it looks worse than it is. Instagram occasionally returns an empty response for a post that is entirely public — we watched the same reel fail and then download cleanly about a minute later. So if the first attempt comes back empty, try it once more before concluding the post is walled off. The error message says as much, which is the least we can do when the platform is the unreliable part.

A post that consistently refuses is a different matter, and usually means what it says: the account is private, or the post is visible only to followers. There is no clever route around that, and any tool claiming otherwise is either wrong or asking you for credentials you should not hand over.

Came for a different source? Those have their own pages: YouTube videos, TikTok videos, podcast episodes, and direct audio links. Not in English? It can come back translated. From a phone, the whole thing works straight out of the share sheet.

Frequently asked

Which Instagram links work?

Reels and ordinary posts that contain video — the ones whose address contains /reel/, /reels/ or /p/. Copy it from the Share menu or straight out of the address bar and paste it whole — the share link works exactly as Instagram hands it over, tracking parameters and all.

Do I need an Instagram account, or to log in anywhere?

No. shrybe fetches the reel the same way an ordinary visitor would, so anything publicly visible works without an account. The flip side is the honest one: if a post is only visible to followers, or the account is private, no tool can reach it without those credentials, and we will not ask you for them.

What about Stories?

Stories are not supported. They expire, and while they exist they sit behind the same visibility rules as the account that posted them. Reels and posts are the durable, public part of Instagram, and that is what this page covers.

The reel already has captions on screen. Why transcribe it?

Because captions burnt into a video are pixels, not text. You cannot search them, quote them, paste them into notes, or hand them to an editor. A transcript is text with timings attached — which is also what a subtitle file is made of.

It failed once and worked the next minute. Why?

Instagram sometimes returns nothing for a post that is perfectly public — we have watched the same reel fail and then download cleanly a minute later. If a first attempt comes back empty, try once more before assuming the post is walled off. That advice is in the error message too.

Does the language matter?

It is detected automatically across 100 languages, and most reels are not in English — that is the normal case here, not an edge case. Accuracy is not even across languages, though; it tracks how much of each language the model saw in training, and the spread is wider than most people assume.

What does it cost?

Nothing, and there is no account to make. Fifteen transcripts per day from one address, up to 75 minutes of audio each. A reel is measured in seconds, so the length ceiling is not the constraint here — the daily count is.

The reel is already in your clipboard.

Paste it above. If you want the words as subtitles rather than as notes, the caption export is the same transcript in a different wrapper.