Zoom Pro or Otter for Business users can now enjoy live captions during your Zoom meetings, so you don’t have to worry about mishearing anything.
The pandemic should lock people in their houses for a while. So, we’ll all have to slog through endless Zoom meetings before it’s all over. However, Zoom does want to make video calls easier for everyone. The company has added Otter.ai’s live captioning system to its video calls.
Zoom Live Captions
Gizmodo reports that Otter.ai has teamed up with Zoom back in April. At first, Otter would just create transcripts of meetings. However, the company has decided to add live captioning to video calls. If you pick this option, you’ll see subtitles appear whenever somebody speaks, nearly in real-time.
Any advances to make our video chat hell a little easier to navigate are welcome. https://t.co/RQ5TYdiiaZ
— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) November 3, 2020
How Do I Use Zoom Live Captions?
However, you’d have to be an enterprise customer to use this feature. In other words, you need to subscribe to Otter for Business or Zoom Pro. While COVID-19 has brought more users to Zoom, other online meeting apps have beaten it in many ways. For example, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams already offer live captions for video meetings.
Still, everyone should benefit from live captions. People with hearing problems wouldn’t miss out on essential data anymore. Moreover, the captions would make sure everybody won’t mishear anything.
Does It Work?
ZDNet tested the feature. They reported that “some sentences don’t make sense, and words occasionally come up deformed.” However, the feature remains reliable. With enough use, it would only get better, too. Maybe this system would help us all adapt to the grind of Zoom meetings.
