Participant captioning in Zoom
June 15, 2024 4:34 PM   Subscribe

Is it possible to get captioning or live transcription in Zoom as a single meeting participant? What am I doing wrong?

At my last job, we used Microsoft Teams, and I could enable my own captioning without bothering anyone. Now I’m in a Zoom environment and can’t figure out how to do this.

I recently tried to enable captions in a Zoom meeting, and was horrified that the the meeting host, who was sharing their screen, got a notification of my request that was broadcast to all 30-odd participants, and the host didn’t know how to respond and it interrupted the whole session. Also, would my request force all the other meeting participants to have captioning on? Is there a way to unobtrusively enable captions for myself, without having to enable for all? I’m talking about the type of meeting that wouldn’t normally be recorded/transcribed.

Googling the question seems to suggest that I might be out of luck, as Zoom does not provide this level of personalised accessibility.

I understand that there are captioning plug-ins that can be used to generate more accurate transcriptions, but I’m really just looking for some text accompaniment to supplement my ability to hear and follow the conversation. It’s OK if it’s not 100% accurate. And what about if I am the meeting host? Can I enable captions just for myself?
posted by amusebuche to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
My workplace uses Teams but when I join the meetings of networking groups that use Zoom (a couple of times a month?), I had NO idea that when I turn on captions in Zoom they turn on captions for everyone! It's never been an issue - no one has ever said anything about it; the host has never raised it.

Anyway, whenever I turn on captions in Zoom, yes, there's a notification that comes up "a participant has enabled captions." Apparently other people can hide the captions when they come up; here's a good overview of captions in Zoom.

I'm sorry the host was so thrown off when you turned on captions.
posted by foxjacket at 5:04 PM on June 15, 2024 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Yes, to use native captioning in Zoom the host has to have it enabled for the meeting overall.
posted by augustimagination at 5:04 PM on June 15, 2024 [4 favorites]


Best answer: The meeting host has to have it enabled, and then when someone turns it on, it does send an announcement saying they've been turned on (but it doesn't say who turned it on). It won't put the actual captions for other participants unless they've clicked the button saying they want captions (or haven't unclicked it ever). If they are getting captions and don't want them, they can click the button saying they don't want to see them (but it won't affect anyone else).
posted by lapis at 5:22 PM on June 15, 2024 [4 favorites]


Here's the Zoom documentation for captions, which addresses some of your questions in more detail.
posted by limeonaire at 9:35 PM on June 15, 2024


FWIW my experience is that people enable this all the time, essentially for accessibility reasons, so other people might be somewhat used to it even if the host wasn’t . As others have noted it is anonymous. The only annoying thing is that screen sharers often don’t think or know to click the close button on the popup.
posted by advil at 8:09 AM on June 16, 2024 [3 favorites]


« Older Need suggestions for Great Smoky Mountain trip!   |   Help me help my kindle Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments