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

Modified on Mon, 28 Nov 2022 at 08:43 AM

TABLE OF CONTENTS



Automated Captions In Zoom


In a meeting, the host can provide manual captioning, or 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. This will explain how to turn on Zoom's automated caption feature.


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.


  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.


Automated Captions In Microsoft Teams

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

The option to turn live captions on in a meeting's call controls

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


Please Note: Closed Captioning is not saved after 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.Class Recordings screen showing the settings button below the title of the video.
  3. Click into Settings and use the left-hand navigation inside the new window to go to Captions (shown below)Class recordings is circled to show the pathway to  the settings button, screen showing the settings menu for captions, below request captions choose a caption service is selected and automatic machine captions is highlighted.
  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.
    Hovering over the video in Class recording brings up several options. Edit is circled. 
  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.

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