Objective
Following these steps will enable Zoom Live Transcripts, which allows for real-time captions during Zoom meetings and generates a transcript when the meeting ends.
Environment
Zoom Web Conferencing
Before You Begin
Important: This feature is not meant to be used as a substitute for Real-time Transcription and Captioning (CART) or American Sign Language (ASL) accommodations associated with an official accommodation request.
Live captions and transcripts are machine-generated using an AI caption engine and may not be 100% accurate.
Steps
- Sign in to https://msu.zoom.us/.
- Click your profile picture and select Settings.
- Select Meeting from the far-left menu.
- Under In Meeting (Advanced), select the Manual captions or Automated captions (live transcription) toggle to enable or disable it.
- If a verification dialog displays, select Enable or Disable to verify the change.
If the option is grayed out, it has been locked at either the group or account level. You need to contact your Zoom admin.
- (Optional) Select the check boxes to enable additional features:
- Manual captions:
- Allow use of caption API Token to integrate with 3rd-party Closed Captioning services.
- Allow viewing of full transcript in the in-meeting side panel: If disabled, participants cannot view the full transcript in the side panel. They can only view captions in the video window of the meeting or webinar. Participants also won't be able to save captions. See Saving closed captions in a meeting for more.
When enabled by the host, participants will see a notification above Closed Caption/Live Transcript in the meeting controls, informing them that one of these services is available.
Additional Info
Starting May 18, 2026, users can no longer save or download closed captions. Captions will remain available during meetings, with up to 3 minutes of scroll back, and during recording playback in the Zoom Workplace app or web portal.
If you rely on saved captions, you'll need to enable Meeting transcripts to continue retaining speech-to-text data.
Learn more about the meeting captions and transcript updates.
Closed Captioning Support
Zoom users can achieve captioning capabilities for hearing impaired users by using Zoom with this active third-party software: http://www.telestream.net/overview.htm
For more information on Telestream closed-captioning support, see http://www.telestream.net/telestream-support/captioning/support.htm