Between work research, side-hustle rabbit holes, and the endless “must-watch” recommendations, I was bleeding hours to YouTube. Switching to transcripts helped—but copying, cleaning, and filing them still felt like work. So I stitched together two Apple Shortcuts that now do the heavy lifting for me. I trigger them multiple times a day; they’ve already saved dozens of hours and a mountain of mental bandwidth. Pair them with NotebookLM, Speechify and ChatGPT and I have transforemed some long boring videos into quick easy to digest fun to listen to segments for myself.
Launches Tactiq.io and preps the transcript for copying.
| Step | What Happens | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
1. Trigger from the share sheet (or run manually). • Share > More… > Transcribe YouTube • No share? It falls back to your clipboard URL. |
Cuts friction—no app-hopping, no manual pasting. | from any YouTube vid, you just click share > More > Transcribe and you’re off! |
2. Opens tactiq.io with the video already loaded. |
Tactiq pulls the full transcript for free. Shout-out to their team. | |
| 3. Waits 8 seconds and then asks, “Ready to continue?” | Mobile networks + Tactiq’s load time can be flaky. The manual confirmation keeps the flow bullet-proof. | you need a little time to have everything load and click the copy transcript button. |
| 4. You tap “Run” after hitting Copy Transcript in Tactiq. | Guarantees the text is on your clipboard before we hand off to Shortcut 2. |
Note: Shortcut 1 isn’t strictly required, but it keeps the process very tap simple—especially on spotty mobile data.
Strips the junk, files the gold.
Grabs the raw transcript from your clipboard.
Splits every line, removes timestamp bricks (00:03:14.912) and header clutter.
Detects the video title and stashes both title + clean text as variables.
Saves a copy to:
My Second Mind notion template (Coming soon)
Apple Notes (offline fallback)
(Change or delete these destinations as you wish.)
Opens the new Apple Note so you can skim, highlight, or trash it on the spot.
Result: a single, readable block of text—perfect for quick searching, quoting, or feeding into ChatGPT for idea-storming.