How to get the transcript of a Panopto lecture

Checked against university Panopto guides on 11 October 2026

Most Panopto recordings have automatic captions. You can show them over the video, read them all as a list in the Captions tab, and download them as a text file. Here's where each of those is, and what the download leaves out.

Turn on captions

Click the CC button at the bottom right of the video. Captions are usually off when a recording opens.

Read the whole transcript

  1. Open the recording in the full Panopto viewer (an embedded video usually has a link that opens it in Panopto).
  2. Select the Captions tab. Every caption line is listed with its time.
  3. Click a line to jump the video there, or search the recording for a word.

Download it

  • Full viewer: in the Captions tab, click the download icon in the top right corner of the captions list.
  • Embedded video (inside a Canvas, Moodle or Blackboard page): expand the player controls at the bottom, open More actions at the top right, and choose Download transcript.

Either way you get a .txt file with the words but no timestamps, so you can't use it to find where in the lecture something was said. If you don't see the option, the recording has no captions or downloads aren't offered for it.

When the captions are wrong

Automatic captions mishear names, formulas and technical terms, more so when the audio is quiet or echoey. Check anything you'll rely on against the recording itself, and tell your lecturer if a lecture's captions are unusable: they can edit them.

Ask questions about the lecture

Sidekick Tutor, a Chrome extension I wrote, does this. With a Panopto recording open, press Alt+Shift+A and ask something like "what's the difference between the two methods he compared?" It reads the full captions, timestamps included, so answers point to the minute and you can click to jump there. You don't need to turn captions on first.

Coming soon to Chrome Free for 10 questions a week, no account needed.

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