Zoom allows users to enable auto-generated captions during meetings. While automatic captions are never 100% accurate, this setting can help to make your meetings more accessible for your participants.
transcription limitations
Before enabling this setting, it’s important to be aware that automatically generated captions using Zoom’s live transcription feature will have limitations. Zoom covers this point well on their website:
“The accuracy of Zoom’s live transcription feature depends on many variables, such as but not limited to:
- Background noise
- Volume and clarity of the speaker’s voice
- Speaker’s proficiency with the English language
- Lexicons and dialects specific to a geography or community
Auto captions using Zoom CC button
As the Zoom meeting host (the teacher) you do not have to enable the captions button for the students (as was previously the case), you can now just signpost them to click on their own “Show Captions” button in their Zoom interface
Language note
It is recommended that the Zoom class (teacher and students) agree to all to use English as the caption language (as per the teaching language protocol),
because if either one of them is set to a different language, then this has been noted to prevent the Zoom auto captions facility from functioning correctly.
If the participant then clicks on their own ‘live transcript’ button and selects ‘view full transcript’ :
They can then see a full transcript as it happens with icon colour coding for different speakers, in the transcript column window in Zoom:
Viewing transcripts in Zoom recordings
ITS informs us “Saving of captions is disabled for data protection reasons but they can be viewed in the recordings and chat view panel”
The procedure for this is to select recording the Zoom meeting to “Record to the cloud” as below:
Editing your transcripts
To create a truly accurate record of the meeting (and to add a real boost to accessibility), you can edit your transcripts in the Zoom portal. For more information, see this guide:
Editing the automatically-generated captions of your Zoom recordings
Sharing Zoom recording and transcript link
After you have finished recording, Zoom sends out two emails
NOTE The first email cloud recording will include a link “SHARE RECORDING WITH VIEWERS“. You will need to copy this specific link and share full details including password, see below:
the second email audio transcript will contain text you can copy and share with others of “recording information below“ and note remember to share full details including password
Further information
For further information you can check out the Zoom website info on auto captions.
