Speaker 1: Hi, this is Dr. Ben Finio here with LegoGuy, and as you can see in the bottom of this video, I have automatic closed captions going in Zoom. In this video, I'll show you a couple different ways to get closed captions in Zoom, and we'll take a look at how well it works. Now to turn those closed captions on as the meeting host, you need to click the Live Transcript button down in the toolbar at the bottom of your Zoom window. When you click that, there are three different options. You can assign someone to type, you can use a third-party closed captioning service, or you can enable built-in auto-transcription from within Zoom. Now a couple things to note, if you do not see that Live Transcript button or do not have all of the options available, this might be something you need to enable in your Zoom settings in a web browser. So go ahead and log into your account in a browser, go over to Settings, then I find it easiest just to Control-F for Closed. That will bring you down to this setting for Closed Captioning. Make sure that is turned on, and if available, check this box for Enable Live Transcription. Now as of April 2021, when I am recording this video, Zoom has a note on the Help page for Closed Captioning and Live Transcription that the built-in Live Transcription service is not available to users with free accounts. They are working towards making that available by fall of 2021. In the meantime, if you have a free account and you want Live Transcription, they will offer it on a case-by-case basis, so you can sign up by clicking this link on the website. So let's go back to the meeting and take a look at these options. That first one is to either assign somebody else to type or do the typing yourself. So I will try it out myself. If I click that button, it brings up a window where you can see the previous transcript so far from when I was using auto-transcription, and it gives me a little window down here at the bottom where I can try to type. So let's try this out and see if I can keep up with my own speech. So I am going to try to talk as fast as I can type, or rather, type as fast as I can talk. And you can see right away there that I'm not the fastest typer in the world, and I definitely have to slow down my speech in order to let the typing keep up pace with my speech. So when I hit Enter there, that is then going to show up at the bottom here, and we'll talk about this a little more later. Note that each viewer can click and drag this around to a different place on the window if you want to. So if you are relying on this with a free account and you don't have the live transcription automatic transcription enabled, and you have somebody assigned, unless they're a court stenographer or a really fast typer, you might have to have some longer pauses or intentionally talk slower so they can keep up with you, otherwise you're probably going to start running into a lot of typos and dropped words or maybe even entire sentences that get missed if you're going too fast. So let's close this and then skip ahead to trying out the built-in Zoom auto-transcription again. So I'm going to click the Live Transcript button here. As the host, I can switch over to auto-transcription, and that should turn this on automatically and just start putting that auto-transcript at the bottom of the screen. So you can see this is actually doing a pretty good job. This is impressive. Real-time speech processing is kind of difficult as opposed to having something where, like when you upload a video to YouTube, it can take some time to get it right, and it might take a few minutes or even a couple hours to upload the transcript. So you'll see that as this is appearing, the words might change a bit. It'll type something else first and then kind of take a half-split second to process, but I think this is doing a pretty good job. You know, it'll have trouble with things like, my name, Dr. Ben Finio. Yeah, it likes to turn that into two words, Funio, so words that aren't a kind of standard word in English, or if you have a very heavy accent, we'll get into some of the disclaimers on their website in a little bit. It might not do a great job, or maybe if you're teaching a very scientific course or a course with a lot of jargon there, it might not recognize the words. So I'll try out. I teach an electronics class, so let's try some of this out. Resistor, capacitor, inductor, transistor, I don't know where I got that close enough. Operational amplifier, oscilloscope, definitely got oscilloscope wrong. Okay, so you can see. You can try this out and, you know, use some of the words you know you'll be speaking when you're teaching or in your business or work or whatever it is you do and see if it has trouble recognizing specific words. But with kind of general everyday English, it seems like it's doing a pretty good job. Now finally, there's this option for a third party closed captioning service that keeps getting mentioned here, and you might wonder why you would bother using a third party service if it's built into Zoom. And if you read this section of the Zoom website, it's basically a disclaimer saying that there are a bunch of limitations to their service, so it's probably not good enough yet to meet a certain reliability standard. So it can depend on things like background noise, volume and clarity of the speaker's voice, the speaker's accent or dialogue. And then they have this disclaimer here, because of these limitations, if you are required to use speech to text support for any compliance or accessibility needs in your meetings and webinars, we do recommend using a manual captioner or service that may be able to guarantee a specific accuracy. So that's basically Zoom admitting that their built in tool is not necessarily good enough if you have some level of accuracy that you need to meet. So I did not actually try any of these, I briefly tried looking around for third party services that are compatible with Zoom. But if you click through this link to the Zoom website, it just shows you how to set up a third party service, it does not recommend any. And if you Google Zoom third party captioning service, you do get a bunch of ads for different sites. But the articles for the best ones are almost a year old now. So it was a little surprise there wasn't a more recent article from 2021 about third party captioning in Zoom. You know, here's a Reddit thread from sometime last year. So if anybody does have experience with a third party software that integrates with Zoom for captioning, then I'd be curious to hear about it in the comments in this video. And then maybe I can check that out in a future one. But I didn't feel like signing up and creating accounts for things. So I did not try this one out. But again, if anyone watching this has experience, please let the rest of us know how it went in the comments. Now let's circle back and look at some of the in meeting controls for this. So first of all, just because you have turned closed captioning on for the meeting does not mean it will force these to be on for every single viewer. So again, you can click and drag these around. Maybe if they are blocking somebody in gallery view, when you want to move them to a different part of your screen, you can do that. But individual viewers can turn them off completely. So you have this little up arrow next to the live transcript button. If you click that, you have the hide subtitle option. So the host kind of has two different options on this button. You can click the button itself to select which option you are using. And then you have this little up arrow that gives you some more controls, for example, turning them off. So that doesn't turn them off for everyone. That just hides them for you. For regular users who are not the host, they don't have those two different options. They just click this button once and then they'll get this menu. The other non-host participants can't toggle between these different settings for the closed captioning. So this here that I'm showing is just for the host. So again, if you're the host, you want to enable closed captioning for the meeting, but you don't want to view them yourself. You can turn them off or turn them back on here with the hide and show subtitles button. So next is view transcript. So if you want to see what people said previously, again, you click that button and go to view full transcript. This gives you a window that looks kind of like the chat window. So this could be confusing if you have both of these open at once. Actually, it looks like it doesn't let me have both of them open at once, which is different from how Zoom handles the chat and participants windows. It will split these vertically and let you see both at the same time. But it looks like if you open the transcript, it takes over the entire right-hand part of the screen here. So if you want to catch up on what has been said so far or scroll back and see something somebody said earlier, kind of like how it treats the chat window, you could do that here. Note that there is also a save transcript button. So this is interesting for people who have privacy concerns and are worried about whether meetings are being recorded or whether chats get saved and who can see private chats and all of that. As far as I know, everything anybody says here is going to show up in this transcript window and then anyone can save it. So this is kind of anything you say can and will be used against you moment. If you don't want it to show up in the transcript, then don't say it out loud in a Zoom meeting. This is different from, for example, sending direct messages in chat, where if you send direct messages between users, those are not visible to the host and they won't show up in that saved chat log. Anything anybody says is going to show up here in the live audio transcript. So again, if you don't want it to get recorded and saved, don't say it out loud. One quick nice thing to note about the transcript, it does show you who is talking. So you'll notice that in the little live box over here, it doesn't put my name there. So if there were multiple people talking in this meeting, and I'm not sure if it would be clear actually who is saying what, hopefully, I guess the idea is you would look at the thumbnails and see whose lips are moving. So then you would figure out who's talking, but there's no little Ben Finio is talking here. But when you go back through the transcript, and you were trying to figure out who said what, then it does show who was speaking before each transcribed line. Finally, there's one more option to look at here. There's this subtitle settings button, and it looks like there aren't really very many settings. You can just change the size of the font, so you can make that really tiny. I had it jacked up all the way, so it would be easier for those of you watching this on YouTube to see. But that's pretty much it. You can't change the font or the color or anything else. For now, it looks like that control is just font size. And if you go down here, this is actually on the accessibility tab in the Zoom settings. So there are a bunch of other things related to screen readers and alerts. I'm not going to cover those in this video. Maybe that is a topic for a future video. But for now, again, I think that it actually defaulted to very small for me when I first turned this on. So if you want to turn the font size up, this is where you come to do that. And I lied. One more note. This pretty much doesn't work in breakout rooms. So they outright say if you want to do this in breakout rooms, you need to use a third party service. If you want somebody to type, only one person can be assigned to type for the whole meeting. You cannot assign different typists for each breakout room. So that would mean you can only have one breakout room that has captions. The other ones would not. And live transcription is currently not supported in breakout rooms at all. So again, I haven't really experimented with the third party stuff. I'm not clear on how this would work. But if you want closed captions in breakout rooms, then assigning someone to type or using the live transcription are not options. That's it for now. Thank you for watching if you have made it this far. If you are a new viewer, I have a giant playlist of other Zoom tutorials that I have made over the last year since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can check that out linked in the description below this video. I get most of my ideas for new tutorials from questions and comments I get on the old ones. So if you do have a question or a suggestion for another tutorial, I cannot promise I will get to everything, but I will do my best to get back to you if you go ahead and leave a comment below this video. Thank you. One little bonus feature at the end here. You guys may have noticed that just a minute ago, Zoom interpreted COVID-19 as Korean 19. And you think if there was one thing they would get right over the past year, that would be it. But apparently not. We have gotten Kobe, Colby, Korea. Let's see, COVID-19, COVID-19, no not COVID, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19. Okay so, I guess there are about a dozen different interpretations there, so if anybody at Zoom is watching this, maybe you guys could fix that one, but otherwise I think you're doing a pretty good job. Thanks.