How I Built a Recipe Extractor from YouTube Using AWS Transcribe

"Cooking videos are great, but following along in the kitchen is a pain. You're elbow-deep in dough and suddenly need to rewind for that one ingredient you missed." So I built a small pipeline that takes any YouTube cooking video, pulls the audio, sends it to Amazon Transcribe, and gives me a clean text file of the entire recipe. No paid tools. No complex setup. Just AWS services and a few Python scripts. What the Pipeline Does YouTube Video ↓ Download Audio (yt-dlp) ↓ Upload to S3 ↓ Amazon Transcribe ↓ recipe.txt Four steps. That's it. Step 1 — Download the Audio I used yt-dlp to pull just the audio from the video. No need to download the full video. yt-dlp \ --extract-audio \ --audio-quality 0 \ --output "output/audio.%(ext)s" \ "https://youtu.be/YOUR_VIDEO_ID" One thing I ran into — ffmpeg was not installed on my machine, so the mp3 conversion failed. But Amazon Transcribe supports webm format natively, so I skipped the conversion entirely and uploaded the raw .webm file. Saved time