Auto-Generated Captioning Available to All Zoom Users

Zoom has added auto-generated closed captioning, dubbed Live Transcription, to all free Zoom Meetings accounts in a bid to make its service more accessible.

According to a post on Zoom’s blog, Live Transcription will provide subtitles on video meetings and webinars, a feature that initially was exclusive to paid accounts. Currently, the captions are only in English, but there are plans to expand to other languages in the future.

Zoom has provided detailed instructions on how to enable the auto-enabled captions in a support article. Participants in an organization's account won’t be able to activate the captions from their end, but instead will have to ask the account admin to turn it on.

Meeting participants can ask the host to enable Live Transcription via the meeting toolbar.

If the auto-captioning doesn’t meet expectations, Zoom does support manual captioning, which allows a participant to provide captions in real-time. The platform also supports captioning from a third-party service via the Close Captioning Rest API.

Live Transcription was announced in February as a commitment by Zoom to make its platform more accessible. Zoom has a dedicated page on its website that lists the numerous platform accessibility features added recently.

Some of the new features include screen reader support and the ability to pin multiple videos at once to highlight a key speaker. Zoom also asks its users to give feedback so they can improve their platform.