Send real-time captions from Web Captioner to a Zoom meeting.
Use Zoom's new closed captioning feature (recommended)
Zoom now supports closed captions and live transcription natively. For the best results in adding live captions to your Zoom meeting, and due to an issue with Zoom's captioning API, I now recommend you use Zoom's closed captioning feature instead of the Zoom channel in Web Captioner. Learn more about setting up closed captioning in Zoom.
Add captions to Zoom with Web Captioner (old method - not recommended)
| If you are... | You can... |
|---|---|
| Hosting a Zoom meeting and want to make captions available for just your own voice | Continue with the instructions on this page. |
| Hosting a Zoom meeting and want to make captions available for all participants' voices | Continue with the instructions on this page, and then follow instructions for routing Zoom's audio into Web Captioner. |
| Participating in a Zoom meeting where the host may not be doing captioning | Follow instructions for rerouting Zoom's audio into Web Captioner. |
Getting started
Step 1: Enable closed captioning in Zoom
You'll only need to follow these steps once.
- Log into your Zoom account settings: https://zoom.us/profile/setting
- Scroll down to the Closed captioning setting and turn it on.
- Optionally, you can also turn on the Save captions setting if you want participants to be able to save transcripts from Zoom.
Step 2: Link your Zoom meeting to Web Captioner
Zoom requires that you do this for every new meeting.
- In a Zoom meeting or webinar that you are hosting, click the Closed Caption button. Select Copy the API Token and a special token will be copied to your clipboard. Web Captioner will use this token to connect with Zoom.
- Go to Web Captioner Settings > Channels.
- Click on the Zoom channel.
- Paste in the Zoom API token.
- Choose an Update Frequency.
- Click Add Channel.
When you start captioning, captions will now also appear in your Zoom meeting.
If you start a new Zoom meeting, you must create a new token and copy it into Web Captioner. Zoom currently does not let you reuse the same token across meetings.
What captions will look like
After Web Captioner is connected to Zoom, captions will look like this:
