Zoom's Live Automatic Transcription

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Background
• Limitations
• Enabling Live Transcription
• Viewing the Full Transcript
• Saving the Transcript

Background

Zoom meeting hosts can enable live ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) transcriptions for meetings. This is a kind of closed captioning that automatically converts speech into text in real-time. Here is the link to Zoom's documentation on Closed captioning and live transcription.

Limitations

• Automated captioning support for languages besides English requires client version 5.11.9 or higher.

• The accuracy of the automated captions depends on many variables, such as but not limited to background noise, volume and clarity of the speaker’s voice, and lexicons and dialects specific to geography or community. Because of these limitations, if you are required to use speech-to-text support for any compliance or accessibility needs in your meetings and webinars, we recommend using a manual captioner or service that may be able to guarantee a specific accuracy.
• If manual captioning is enabled for the session, you can't use automated captions in the meeting/webinar or breakout rooms.

Enabling Live Transcription

To enable the live transcription, first make sure you are running the latest version of Zoom. The host must enable Live Transcription at the beginning of each Zoom session. Participants will not have access to the closed captions unless the host enables it.

To enable Live Transcriptions/Closed Captioning:

• Click Settings on your Zoom account page.
• Click In Meeting (Advanced), and scroll down to that section of the settings.

• Under Closed Captioning, make sure the slider on the right is enabled, and check the box that says “Enable live transcription service to show transcript on the side panel in-meeting" (The slider will become blue when active.)

While in the Zoom meeting click on the Closed Caption icon to open the pop-up menu and select Enable Auto-Transcription.

 The captions will appear at the bottom of the Zoom meeting window. 

Viewing the Full Transcript

To view the full transcript, click on the caret (^) within the Closed Captioning to access an additional menu and choose View Full Transcript. The full transcript will appear on the right-hand side of the meeting, this is also where the chat and participant windows appear. 

The transcript window can be “Popped Out” into its own moveable window. This is helpful if the user wants to view the transcript and participate in the Zoom Chat or manage participants.

Saving the Transcript

After the meeting is over the Host can download the transcript by visiting their Recordings on the Zoom webpage. During the meeting, the transcript can be saved by the participants. If the host does not want the participants to be able to save and download a copy of the transcript, the Save Captions setting must be disabled in the Zoom webpage settings before the meeting begins.

To save the transcript:

Participants can save the transcript of the Zoom Session by clicking on Save Transcript at the bottom of the transcript window.

To disable this feature:

Click Settings on your Zoom account page.

Click In Meeting (Advanced), scroll down to the Save Captions part of the settings.

Disable “Allow participants to save fully closed captions or transcripts”. 

Created by Sam Rossi of SAS Computing; Used with permission. The original article is linked here.