Douyin Transcript API

Turn any Douyin (抖音) video into text — best-in-class Mandarin speech recognition.

Douyin is the Chinese TikTok — and the hardest major platform to get transcripts from. Videos rarely carry subtitles, and western transcription tools handle Mandarin poorly. This API uses a Mandarin-optimized ASR model (Alibaba Paraformer) that leads Chinese speech benchmarks, so the text you get back is actually usable.

Send a Douyin share link (v.douyin.com), a full video URL, or a bare video ID. You get the full transcript, timestamped sentences, and video metadata — author, description, stats — as clean JSON.

Languages: Mandarin Chinese (best-in-class), English, and 6 more

Call it from code

The API runs on Apify's platform — one HTTP call starts a run and returns the dataset. Get a free API token by signing up (includes $5/month free usage).

# curl — synchronous run, returns transcript items directly
curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/ethereal_wool~douyin-transcript-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"videoUrls": ["https://v.douyin.com/iRNBho6u/"]}'
# Python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("ethereal_wool~douyin-transcript-scraper").call(run_input={
    "videoUrls": ["https://v.douyin.com/iRNBho6u/"],
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["transcript"])
    for s in item["sentences"]:
        print(s["beginTime"], s["text"])

Pricing

$0.025per minute of video transcribed

No subscription, no minimum. Runs that return nothing are never billed.

Frequently asked questions

Does it handle Douyin share links (口令)?

Yes — paste the v.douyin.com short link from the share sheet and the API resolves it to the video automatically.

How accurate is the Mandarin transcription?

The API uses Alibaba's Paraformer-v2 model, which is optimized for Mandarin and consistently tops Chinese ASR benchmarks — significantly better than Whisper on Chinese short-video audio.

What does it cost?

$0.025 per minute of video. A typical 45-second Douyin video costs about $0.019.

Can I transcribe Douyin videos in bulk?

Yes — pass up to hundreds of URLs per run, or call the API programmatically from your pipeline. Each video is billed by its duration only.

Is login or a Douyin account required?

No. Only public video URLs are needed — no cookies, no account, no browser automation on your side.

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