Zoom Allows Captions for Free Accounts

Zoom has announced that it is bringing auto-generated captions (also known as Live Transcription) To all free accounts to make their service even easier.

The platform faces stiff competition from Microsoft Teams, and the company has been looking for ways to improve its offering.

Automatically generated captions are only available in English. But the company says it plans to expand into other languages ​​in the future.

AndShe said Theresa Larkin, Director of Marketing for Meetings and Conversations Products at the company: It is important to us that everyone can connect, communicate and participate successfully using Zoom. People with disabilities face enormous barriers when using video communication solutions without appropriate accessibility tools.

The company previously offered live AI-powered versions only of its paid Meetings and Video Webinars accounts.

This has drawn criticism from accessibility advocates who have noted Zoom calls have become ubiquitous during the pandemic, leaving deaf users with limited options.

Without automatic captions, Zoom meeting hosts either had to use a third-party caption service or add their own captions manually.

The company has added more accessibility options over the past year, including support for screen readers and allowing multiple videos to appear at the same time, allowing the sign language interpreter to be visible at all times, even when another user is speaking on the call.

To enable captions in Zoom meetings, an account owner or user with administrator privileges can log into the Zoom web portal and then find Manage Account in the navigation menu.

You must then choose Account Settings, and then click on the Meeting tab. Under Option In the meeting (Advanced), toggle the Caption option to enable it.

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The feature was previously limited to paid Zoom accounts

“It is important to us that everyone is able to connect, communicate and participate successfully using our platform,” the company said. So we focus on creating a platform that everyone can access. Features like automatically generated captions are an important part of this job.

Zoom believes that it can develop the video conferencing experience that customers prefer over face-to-face conversations, and it plans to do so within the next five to 10 years, said the company’s CEO, Eric Yuan.

Yuan lamented the absence of social rituals such as handshakes and hugs. But he referred to the company’s work on augmented and virtual reality.

“We believe that video calling can provide a better experience than face-to-face meetings in the future,” says Yuan. We haven’t gotten there yet but we’re working on getting there.

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