How to enable Zoom closed captioning
Wouldn't it be great if you could produce accurate live transcriptions right here within your Zoom meetings for free?
Well, the good news is you can, and you can do it with just a single click, even if you're just using the free version of Zoom.
So in this video, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know about closed captioning and enabling auto transcriptions in Zoom.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And let's start off with where you need to go to make sure that your transcriptions are working and available to you.
So first things first, you're gonna want to go into your Zoom settings here, and you're gonna want to select your profile picture and then come all the way down here and select check for updates.
It's really important that you're on the latest version of Zoom to make sure that you can take advantage of this feature.
And here you can see I am on the latest version at this point.
If not, it may take a few minutes.
It may have to restart Zoom, but after you're complete, you can hit close here.
The second step that we wanna take is that we want to actually log in to our Zoom account online.
And usually, you need to go to zoom.us in order to log into your account.
On the left-hand side of the screen, we wanna come down to the admin section.
We want to select account management and then we wanna select account settings.
And then within account settings, what we wanna do is we wanna come over here.
This is sort of our submenu, and we wanna select in meeting advanced.
And that's gonna take us directly to where we want to be.
Zoom transcription settings
Where we see closed captioning.
Now by default, this is probably disabled, so you're probably gonna have to toggle this to turn this on.
Once you've turned this on, you're gonna have these three different options.
These are three different checkboxes.
Now, the first one is to allow use of caption API token to integrate with third-party closed captioning services.
That was a mouthful.
Now, this has been available for some time because there are many other services that allow captioning and providing this service.
But you may not need this or have no need for it in the future.
You can choose if you want to keep this on or off.
It is really the second checkbox where we want to pay the most attention to, allow live transcription service to transcribe meeting automatically.
Now keep in mind by checking this box, it doesn't mean that all of our meetings are going to automatically be transcribed.
We're gonna still have to initiate that, and I'm gonna show you how to do so in just a moment.
The last checkbox is to allow viewing of the full transcript in the in-meeting side panel.
So this can be helpful to both yourself, but also participants of the meeting if they want to go back and review what has been said earlier or even search through some of those keywords.
The only other option here that you're gonna want to double-check is save captions.
Do you want to allow participants to save fully closed captions or a transcript?
So this is up to you if you want to toggle this on or off, but depending on the meeting, this can be a valuable asset.
Using Zoom transcriptions in a meeting
So with our settings in place, let's go see how we can enable this within any of our Zoom meetings or webinars.
So here within my Zoom meeting, if I come down to the bottom, I've got a number of different features, many of which you're already familiar with, such as sharing your screen or accessing your participants.
But because I have live transcripts turned on, here you can see I have this live transcript button.
So I'm gonna select that, and I've got a few different options here.
I've got this API token, for example, here.
This is this third-party closed captioning service.
I can assign someone to type for me, or I can choose if I want to type.
And this can be very helpful, especially if you have someone who is going to be interpreting into another language, or you just trust them to translate and transcribe this particular meeting.
So you can assign yourself or assign someone else.
But where you're most likely going to take advantage of is the live transcript down here.
Now, the last checkbox just before I enable auto transcription says to allow participants to request live transcription.
And this is something that you may have seen more recently where you can ask the host, "Hey, can you please turn on the transcriptions?"
If I uncheck this box, they won't have that ability to request myself, request the host in order to turn these on.
So at this stage, all I need to do is select enable auto transcriptions.
I can now close this box, and here at the bottom of my screen, you can see my words being transcribed in real-time.
Now I am really quite impressed with how accurate and how fast these live transcriptions are.
You can see that the words that are coming out of my mouth are not only almost 100% accurate, but they are being presented in probably half a second after I utter those words.
Moving closed captions on the screen
Now let's take a look at a few other features that we wanna pay attention to.
Sometimes it's not always helpful to have these transcriptions at the bottom, depending on what we are showing, if we're sharing slides or maybe something else on our screen.
So you can always take your cursor and drag your transcriptions to somewhere else on the screen, somewhere else where it's maybe a little more applicable.
Now, this is going to be specific to each and every user, so just because I've dragged it somewhere else, it doesn't mean that my viewers are going to view it in this area.
They can choose as to where they would like this transcription to be displayed.
But let's take a look at one other option that is very helpful, and that is actually accessing these transcriptions if we want to go and search them or review them later.
Viewing full transcript and saving the file
If I come back down to the live transcript button, you will see that there's this small up arrow beside it.
And if I click on this, I can either choose to hide the subtitle, I can change or adjust some of my subtitle settings, or I can view the full transcript.
So if I select this option here on the right-hand side, now I can see the full transcription for this meeting, including what's happening in real-time.
Now, the great thing about this is that I can scroll back up and review what has been said earlier, and you can see that there are timestamps beside each one as well so I can see when it was said.
In this particular example, I'm the only one in this meeting, but if there was someone else, you would also see their profile picture or if they don't have a picture, you would see their initial beside their comment so you can go back and see exactly who said what when.
But last but not least, we can also come up here and search our transcript.
So let me type in the word Zoom.
And now I'm immediately taken to all of the times, all of the phrases where I uttered the word Zoom in this particular case.
So if you forget or if you say to yourself, "I thought we already addressed that.
Or didn't someone else say something on this topic," you can use this search function to go back and see what was said.
Last but not least, if you'd like to save this transcript for your reference or perhaps you'd like to send this out to those who were unable to attend this meeting, you can come down here and select save transcript and then you can download it and use it any way that you wish.
Now if you have any questions about how to use Zoom closed captioning and auto transcriptions, be sure to let me know in the comments down below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult.
In fact, it's very simple.
