Turning On Automatic Captions in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Panopto

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Overview
• Automated Captions In Zoom
• Automated Captions In Microsoft Teams
• Automated Captions inside Panopto Class Recordings in Canvas
• Additional Support

Overview

Below we cover how to toggle on automatic captions in common meeting and video applications used at Penn for live synchronous sessions. Please note that automatic captions are not 100% accurate and should be looked over and edited. 

All media that instructors create with the Penn LPS Media team are professionally captioned and should contain no errors.

Automated Captions In Zoom

In a meeting, the host can provide manual captioning, an integrated third-party closed captioning service can provide the captioning, or Zoom’s automated captions (also known as live transcription) feature can provide automatic captioning. Please follow the steps below to turn on Zoom's automated caption feature:

1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal at upenn.zoom.us
2. In the navigation menu, click Settings.
3. Click the Meeting tab.
4. Under In Meeting (Advanced), click the Automated captions toggle to enable or disable it.
5. If a verification dialog displays, click Enable or Disable to verify the change. 
   

Please note: If you have turned on automated captions and someone says they can not see the captions, please have them update Zoom. This should solve the issue.

There is no way currently to have automated captions edited while the meeting is in session, but after the meeting, the owner of the video and transcript can edit the transcript of the meeting by going to the Zoom Web Portal and navigating to the recording and clicking on the pencil near the video.

Automated Captions In Microsoft Teams

• To use live captions in a meeting, go to your meeting controls and select More options > Turn on live captions.

• To stop using live captions, go to the meeting controls and select More options > Turn off live captions.

Please Note: Closed Captioning is not saved after the meeting. If participants want a saved option, they will need to record the meeting and select record and transcribe. That will give participants a transcription to download at the end of the meeting.

Automated Captions inside Panopto Class Recordings in Canvas

1. Inside Canvas, go to Class Recordings. 
2. Hover over the video to which you would like to add automatic captions and wait for the Settings button to appear below the video's title.
3. Click into Settings and use the left-hand navigation inside the new window to go to Captions (shown below)
4. Inside the Captions Window, you should see a section titled Request Captions. There will be a drop-down menu that allows selecting a caption service. You will not have all the above options, but you should have Automatic Machine Captions. Once you select Automatic Machine Captions, your video will then be captioned.
   
   Please note: Machine Captioning differs from human captioning, so we advise reviewing and editing the captions to be the best they can be for your students.
   
   

To Edit Automatic Captions in Panopto:

1. Hover over the video you would like to edit captions for. Wait for several buttons to appear below the title of the video. Select Edit.
    
2. Select Captions from the left-hand menu on the next screen.
3. Watch the captions appear on the left as you watch the video. They will be associated with a time stamp. If any are incorrect, pause the video. Hover over the incorrect segment of captions on the left, and three dots will appear (...)
4. Select the three dots, and correct the captions. 
5. Click Save and exit from the video

Additional Support

If you have any issues with setting up automatic captions for a video service above or you would like to enable automatic captioning for a different service and dont see it listed, please contact online-learning-help@sas.upenn.edu, and we can assist further.