The free Zoom user account is added with a useful automatic captioning feature

As planned, Zoom has just brought one of the premium features that are only available on paid accounts to the free user community, which is automatic captioning.

In other words, users of the free Zoom account can now also experience real-time automatic captioning during their online video calls. Subtitles will be created corresponding to each person's speech in the meeting, with high accuracy and real-time matching.

This is an extremely useful feature for people who are deaf, or in online meetings where you have to communicate with foreign partners who do not speak the same language. Sharing about the new feature, a Zoom representative said:

'An important goal for us is to make it easy for everyone to connect, communicate and collaborate using Zoom. Therefore, without appropriate support solutions, people with disabilities will face enormous barriers when using online video communication solutions'.

At the moment, the new automatic captioning feature is only compatible with the most popular language, English. but Zoom says it plans to add support for other language options in the near future.

Automatic captioning will not be enabled by default, and users will need to manually enable them on their account. The process is not complicated at all. First, you log in to your Zoom account, then navigate to the 'Account Management' page, and click on 'Account Settings'. Here, click the 'Meeting' tab, then go to 'In Meeting (Advanced)', then click 'Closed captioning' to enable this feature. When the feature is activated, you will see English subtitles generated directly in your Zoom calls.

Lesley Montoya

Update 28 October 2021