How to Turn On Live Captions in Zoom for Easier Listening

Zoom has a built-in live captions feature that displays spoken words as text at the bottom of the screen during a meeting. Each participant's words appear in real time, making it much easier to follow along — especially in a noisy environment, if you have hearing loss, or if someone has a strong accent.

Live captions (also called automated captions) are available on the free Zoom plan. The meeting host must have the captions feature enabled in their Zoom account settings, and individual participants can then turn captions on or off for themselves.

If you are joining a meeting and want captions, you look for the "CC" button in the meeting toolbar. If you are hosting, you may need to first enable the feature in your Zoom account settings online before it shows up during meetings.

Zoom also offers a full transcript feature — a running text transcript of the whole meeting that you can read and download after the call ends. This is especially useful for longer meetings or for reviewing what was said.

Captions are generated automatically by Zoom's speech-to-text engine. Accuracy is generally very good in quiet environments with clear speakers, though it can struggle with heavy background noise or multiple people talking at once.