Zoom Live Captions

Zoom Live Captions are built into the meeting experience and toggle on through accessibility settings during a call. Captions appear at the bottom of the screen with the speaker identified, and accuracy on clean English audio has improved enough to be useful as a real-time aid for hard-of-hearing participants and for note-taking.

Multi-language support has grown but still lags dedicated tools like Otter and JotMe on accents and rapid speech. For podcasters recording remote interviews on Zoom, the value is twofold. During the call, the live caption track gives a real-time check on whether the audio is clear and the conversation is on topic.

After the call, if Zoom recording is enabled, captions can be preserved as a transcript or VTT file for the recorded session, which feeds the next stage of a workflow. Without recording enabled, the captions vanish when the call ends.

Zoom Live Captions are not a caption styling tool — no template library, no animation, no burn-in. The output is functional and accessible.

They are included in most Zoom paid plans and available with limitations on the free tier. For studio-grade captions on the published episode, a downstream tool — Whisper, YouTube auto-captions, or a hosted service — will still be needed for SRT export and styling.