Automatically Save Closed Caption Transcript

[lcvachta]

The Auto-Generated Closed captions are a very useful tool on meetings, and I know that we have the ability to save the transcripts. I would like to see an option to automatically save the transcript of meetings, differentiated based on whether I am a participant or host. Or at least a prompt. As it currently stands if I forget to save the transcript before I leave a meeting there is no way to recover it. 

Tyler

[YaBoiB]

Hello all,  

 It is very possible that I am incorrect about our logic here. Again, I do not use this so I have zero practical knowledge on the topic. Let me work with our backend team on this request and see what I can come up with. For those of you that have a TAM (Technical Account Manager) or CSM (Customer Success Manager) assigned to your account, please consult with them and ask them to tag Brandon W. in a Zoom chat, so that I can align teams. 

For those that do not have those folks assigned to your account, please subscribe to this thread and I will begin working on this and provide a solution asap. Please note that I work in the community on my own time (volunteer) so I will try to expedite this as quickly as I can, but I must perform my assigned duties prior to working on this platform. 

Thank you for your feedback and understanding. If it is needed, I will put together a meeting for us to discuss this issue and set the time and date that is feasible for all on this thread. 

[ryan_fitch]

@YaBoiB 
A few simple use cases to emphasize value:

1. Uploading the transcript to an LLM/AI model to summarize the meeting or create notes

2. A simple log of what was said for reference to attach to notes/confluence

In both use cases above an incomplete transcript causes issues. Important information may have been discussed between the last time the user clicked the "Save transcript" button and when the meeting was ended. This is inclusive of meeting owners who may have forgotten to click the button.

Additionally, a full video and audio log are likely either not useful (due to restrictions on organization approved LLMs; that do not digest video or audio but do digest text documents) or just simply prohibitively excessive for the intended purpose.

In use case #1, you can do a lot of different digestions of the transcript log to pull out important information, action items, prominent topics, changes in direction/topics, primary concerns, speaker prominence, etc.. If you have repeat occurrences of the same meeting or subject you can even do deltas in the transcripts to identify what topics, questions, concerns, etc. happened in one session that may not have occurred in others.

The short and simple is that the transcript has tremendous value on it's own, independent of video and audio. Especially as user name association is easier to pull out in a transcript vs video and audio.

Adding an auto-save for the transcript will alleviate user frustration and enable them to maximize the use of Zoom.

[marilynejackson]

Right!!

[YaBoiB]

Hello @ryan_fitch, 

 Does Zoom AI Summary meet any of these requirements? I do use this everyday and it is fantastic for me. Not trying to argue with anyone in here. My goal is to meet your needs, but I do need to understand the ask a little better. Next week, I will work on setting up a meeting with some of you on this thread. 

[ryan_fitch]

Hi @YaBoiB 

Zoom AI Summary could cover use case #1 to a limited extent. However, not every organization that has an enterprise license with Zoom will enable or use the Zoom AI assistant/features.

Security is an exceedingly high concern when using LLM/AI products. Especially in industries/sessions where intellectual property (IP) is a primary concern. My personal background (BioTech) is one of these, but I'm sure you can imagine that for many other fields this would be equally or more of a constraint. Security teams in a business will restrict LLM/AI use to either internal tools or tools that have been fully vetted and approved.

Security aside, internal LLM/AI tools can be exceedingly more useful than a standard AI tool (from Zoom or other companies) because it can be trained on content that standard AI tools do not have access to. If company "A" has trained an LLM on 5 years of study data, it is feasible for the LLM to cite specific documents where the topics being discussed are relevant/influential.

Taking that last point a tiny bit further; you could also provide "fine-tuning" to an internal LLM/AI with additional data and documents, such as transcripts and ongoing study data. This would again give you the ability to trace conversations and understand the history of a topic combined with IP sensitive data (that would not be in the zoom AI assistance purview). Zoom AI assistant is focused primarily on the current meeting session, not additional related data or other zoom sessions. Even if it did connect the dots on related zoom sessions, that would be a huge security risk that would require explicit contracts around data integrity and restriction from zoom using it for internal training and fine-tuning. (Even with that last point aside, it still wouldn't have the ability to reference internal documents; internally developed and controlled LLM/AI is a common thing)

With incomplete transcripts, it impacts the capacity of users to get the most usability/functionality out of Zoom.

Zoom AI assistant does not help with use case #2.

[YaBoiB]

Hello @ryan_fitch , 

 So, you are asking Zoom to auto-save transcripts for you, but do not record the meeting, and do not use AI-Summary? Just want to make sure that I am hearing this correctly. I am not a developer, but I talk to them all the time in my role here at Zoom. How would the logic work to scrape the conversations in the meeting and auto-save it as a "log" for you after the meeting session has expired? 

Do you have any experience with MMR servers and their capabilities. I can draw up a plan and send this to Engineering to see if we can build this for you, but I need a clearer picture of how it is to be built. 

Can you share that information with me? Glad to hop in a meeting and discuss. Send me a DM and I will send you my Zoom Scheduler to find a time that works for all of us in this thread who would like to discuss this Feature Enhancement. I am completely intrigued now. Cc @MGSR 

[ryan_fitch]

@YaBoiB I think maybe I'm getting us a bit side-tracked/confused.

You're correct, the ask is to add an option to `auto-save transcripts` *without requiring video+audio recording*.

AI-summary should not be a tag-along requirement; it's an independent thing in Zoom currently and no need to tie it to auto-saving. I'm sure **many** people would use it, but myself personally I would use it sparingly.

The technical implementation of auto-saving is not something I want to pretend I could advise on, haha, so... 

The very simple way of looking at this is asking how video+audio is saved locally on a users computer (instead of the cloud). If a user is recording and saving it locally, the video+audio are saved once the meeting ends to their computer. Saving the transcript at the end of the meeting is the ask. When you start a zoom meeting, there is a button for "Transcript" that initiates a pop-out panel where the transcript is displayed. At the bottom of this panel is a button called "Save transcript" that saves the transcript locally. Instead of requiring users to click that button, the zoom program can/should be able to initiate the action, that the button controls, at the time of the meeting ending. 

[YaBoiB]

@ryan_fitch , 

I understand your request. I will propose creating a toggle feature, similar to the existing cloud ☁️ and local 💻 recording options. This will allow users to choose whether they want to save their transcripts to the "cloud" or to their "local client." I will start collaborating with the Product team on this and will provide updates as soon as possible. Please note that this development process could take weeks ⏳ or even months due to the complexities of our codebase. While I'm not a developer myself, I work closely with them daily and have a good grasp of their processes, especially here at Zoom. I will discuss this matter further with the team and refer them to this thread for context. It's important for you and other Zoom customers to know that the Zoom Community has significant visibility among my team and our product engineering and development teams. They recognize that your input as users plays a crucial role in shaping future releases. 🙌

[marilynejackson]

Thank you. I think that people expect to not have to remember to save a transcript that they've started, during the times when a meeting is not being recorded.  It helps to remember what was said, for minute takers or with consent, could be used in an article they may be writing later.  I have had this feature with an app that goes with Google Meet called Scribbl and it functions this way with Google Education Plus--I gave a screen shot before--they give a message asking if I have consent to save it.  I think people expect that this should work this way.

[YaBoiB]

Hello @marilynejackson , 

 You said something in this reply that triggered a memory for me. You said you are using an app called "Scribbl"  this is a third party vendor app that integrates with Google meet, https://www.scribbl.co/ see website, Zoom has apps like this in our Marketplace. One in particular is this one https://marketplace.zoom.us/apps/JgSwuY4ZSGim6_OPRZV0Ig 

Which you can use with Zoom. It is an AI notetaker like Scribbl, now of course we still "would like" to build this for you on the client, but it is not as "easy" as many on this thread might think. 

That said, I have brought this to the attention of the Product team and I am awaiting their feedback. 

[marilynejackson]

Thanks for thinking of this and for addressing the Product team as well.  

~MJ

[ktr-ez]

All meetings which have closed captions enabled already create a transcript which any participant can save. All participants are shown a pop-up at the beginning of the meeting, or when captions become enabled, alerting them to the fact that captions are on (and thus the meeting is being transcribed). This is parallel to the notification shown when a meeting is recorded. 
Since any participant in a meeting with closed captions can already save the transcript, it follows that automatic saving would be allowed by the same principle. 

Rules may be different across companies and it is possible some companies would request an enterprise feature to disable automatic saving, but as of this time the only functional difference in automatic saving is that instead of attendees clicking a button near the end of the meeting, the action of the button is taken by default.

[sgreco]

OK. SO PROVIDE A LINK TO REQUEST THIS FEATURE. WE ARE REQUESTING THE FEATURE. This is absolutely infuriating that something so simple as an option to auto-save a transcript, at least for a meeting where I am the host, has not been added after 2 years of asking.

[YaBoiB]

@sgreco , 

 Feature Requests do not go through the Zoom Community now, but we are working on that. We ask that you put in a support ticket or go through your TAM and CSM that are assigned to your account.  We are working on a feedback channel for this platform, but it has not yet been completed. Sorry for the inconvenience. 

[PratibhaRana]

We do have the ability to just get a transcript but it needs to be saved manually to disk. In case the meeting ends abruptly, the transcript is lost. It would be nice to automatically save it to the cloud. 

[marilynejackson]

Hi. I started this thread I believe. Can you give the Feedback or can someone else? When I click on my profile picture, I just do not see that option there.... even though it's turned on in the settings.

[CDMaine]

Hi Marilyne - follow the link below.  Anyone can submit feedback.

Feedback

[marilynejackson]

Yes, I do that and click on my profile picture but there is no Help option there....Marilyn (no e)

[MGSR]

Hi @marilynejackson, 

You may need to enable the feedback feature. You can check this article on how to enable it on an account, group, or personal level. 

[DavidMR]

Zoom Transcript and Chat enhancement suggestions

In a meeting which is configured so that ordinary participants can see and save the transcript, when a participant clicks the "Save Transcript" button, he should be presented with four checkboxes labeled as

• Save now
• Save every <number> minutes

(where <number> is an integer entry field accepting values from 1 to 999)

• Save when I leave the meeting
• Save when the meeting ends

(where all possible combinations of the checkboxes are permissible)

and a button (labeled something like "Save" or "Submit" or "Do It", etc.) which will record and implement the selections made with the checkboxes.

Similarly, in a meeting which is configured so that ordinary participants can see and save the chat, when a participant makes the "Save Chat" selection, he should be presented with five checkboxes labeled as

• Save now
• Save every <number> minutes

(where <number> is an integer entry field accepting values from 1 to 999)

• Save every time a chat entry is made or edited
• Save when I leave the meeting
• Save when the meeting ends

(where all possible combinations of the checkboxes are permissible)

and a button (labeled something like "Save" or "Submit" or "Do It", etc.) which will record and implement the selections made with the checkboxes.

[YaBoiB]

Hello @DavidMR, 

This is not the feedback channel. We do have a support article that shows how to provide Feedback to our support team and product team. Please use that forum to provide feedback. 

[DavidMR]

Hi Brandon (YaBoiB),

I think (or at least, I hope) I submitted the suggestion through the Feedback mechanism accessible via the desktop app. The reason I entered it here was to have a discussion with the user community - to see whether there is support for the idea, whether anyone can suggest ways to improve the suggestion, whether there are any downsides that someone can call to my attention, whether there is any known workaround for accomplishing this function without Zoom having to implement the proposed enhancement, etc. That is, to brainstorm with other users to make the best proposal (that will help as many users as possible) to the Zoom product team.

[YaBoiB]

Hello @DavidMR, 

 It is a viable use case. I do not use transcripts in my job here at Zoom, so I do not have any valuable feedback to offer you, but I am sure the community may have some. Although, I recommend that you might want to start your own post, you linked on to a somewhat older post, so I am not sure how much "feedback" you will get. I cannot do it tonight ( it is 9:30 pm here) but I will look around internally tomorrow and see if we have anything on the roadmap for transcripts. It is possible/plausable that other customers are thinking along the same lines as you. 

[DavidMR]

Hello Brandon/@YaBoiB

I submitted feedback via clicking my profile picture n the top-right corner, then clicking Help, then clicking Give Feedback.

But I didn't get a ticket number, so I'm not sure that that process created a ticket. I had additional ideas, so I'll try to create my owen post (as you suggested) with the new, improved enhancement suggestion. Please help me submit this enhancement suggestion as a ticket (or sub mit it for me). Thanks.

[YaBoiB]

Hello @DavidMR, 

 Thank you for this. I will pass this along to the proper Zoom teammates. This is good feedback. 

[YaBoiB]

All Community members in this channel, 

 I have a dialogue going with the Product Team about this Feature Enhancement. More information to come in the following days/weeks. Thank you all for your help. Especially @marilynejackson and @ryan_fitch 

[KVSea]

Thank you, Brandon!

[YaBoiB]

Hello all, 

 In the spirit of transparency, this "could" take awhile, or it could already be on the roadmap, I am still researching along with performing my current role at Zoom, so please be patient with me, but this is a high priority action item for me and I am going to discuss this with the Zoom Community Feature Request team. @MGSR is my lead on this team, so he and I will "drive" this to adoption as quickly as we can. Please add your friends/colleagues to this FR, upvotes help us to show "our" team how important this is to you all. 

Kind regards,

[abs014000]

Thank you for this!  I'm also eagerly awaiting for this feature enhancement!

[mvieve]

Thanks, Brandon! It's so nice to see this kind of responsiveness to users about a feature request.

[Redwan]

This is seriously a basic feature, why those transcript are not automatically saved in the cloud and processed.

I see all those AI companion features that are useless but saving transcript and being able to ask question across those meetings is the real feature we need.

To the least this txt file should be automatically saved ! This is making me move away from Zoom, Google Meet is much better and generate notes.  Zoom is trying to do too many things.

[marilynejackson]

The Google Meet version that I'm using with Google Education Plus is not perfect either.  I don't see the transcript as it happens. When I used the app Scribbl, I liked the way I could see the transcript as it happened.  I think Zoom has that.  It just needs to save it.  We will see if they make the change.

[cymarks]

I would very much like this feature as well. I use transcripts to feed into AI tools for summaries, etc. and I need this for meetings where I am an attendee rather than just the host. Please add a feature so that we can auto-save transcripts for meetings irrespective of if the meeting is recorded, we are the host or a participant or not.

[YaBoiB]

Hello All, 

At this time, Zoom does not have any plans to implement this feature to the Zoom Workplace Client (app).  The reasoning provided is that it could create compliance risks for certain customers and regulated industries, which is why the decision has been made with caution. 

That said, your voices matter. If you’re able to provide use cases—explaining the practical value and impact this feature would have—we are more than willing to bring that feedback forward for deeper consideration. While I want to be transparent that there’s no guarantee the product or leadership teams will approve it, this thread has already gained visibility internally, which significantly helps your case.

Although I wish I had better news to share today, I want you to know that I remain committed to advocating on your behalf. I’ll keep pushing your feedback forward and doing my best to represent your voice within Zoom.

Thank you again for being part of this community.

 

[dimsdale]

>it "can" break compliance for numerous customers and industries

I'm sorry but this is a preposterous and completely ridiculous answer.  The transcript is already being created, in this scenario.  The user can be spamming the "save" button every 30 seconds.  And now the answer is that if the app basically pushes the "save" button for me at the end - that is a compliance issue?  If this is how your in-house legal thinks, then I'm sorry, the problem is on your end.
As it turns out, I've been using otter.ai to make live transcripts, and they are better than the zoom transcripts. And they save automatically and continually.
Without being able to see and always save transcripts, Zoom is of much lesser value to me now. I will probably cancel zoom and just use Google meet with otter.ai.

BTW, just to add insult to injury, as I'm typing this, the forum software is indicating that my message is being auto-saved!! 

"Your content was last auto-saved at 09:45 AM"

What joke. Even zoom's own forum software auto saves messages.  Complete outrage.  Will definitely cancel.

[rgettys]

These are all cases in which I wish I had auto-save. Forgetting to hit the "save transcript" button at the end of a call impacts all of the following use cases. 

Use case 1: Accessibility for deaf/ hard of hearing. People who are hard of hearing being able to read what went on in a meeting after the meeting took place. 

Use case 2: Quick search. Recalling what you or someone else said in a meeting with ctrl+f instead of scrolling through audio or video files. 

Use case 3: Quicker coordination. Helping someone else catch up from a meeting who wasn't there in a way that doesn't require 500 mb. Most emails can't send large files. Reading a transcript is faster than watching a video and some people prefer to be able to read instead of listen. 

Use case 4: Access on the go. Looking over a meeting in a place with no internet-- links to a meeting won't work. While I am on a plane or on the road I still want to be able to look over important meeting notes.  

Use case 4: Translation. Easier translation of a meeting for a client/ teammate who doesn't speak the language the meeting was in. Easier to pop a written transcript into translation software than audio. 

Use case 5: Reflection after a meeting. Reflecting on a meeting to see if there are cues I missed, words I didn't know the meaning of. 

Use case 6: Academic Research. Academic research where transcript analysis is a huge deal. Autosaving transcripts would save projects when a researcher absentmindedly exits out without hitting "save transcript". 

Use case 7: Coaching. Speech coaching/ professionalism coaching. Walking through a transcript with a manager to ask what they would have said differently. 

Use case 8: Build trust with clients. sending a full transcript as a courtesy (some times a "highlights reel" can seem cherry picked if a transcript isn't provided.)

The other option is to upload the audio transcript to a third party AI, which:

- takes my time (sometimes up to an hour),

- additional subscription fees,

- uses energy, and

- shares data that zoom owns to other companies (harming their competitive advantage).

This seems like a waste since zoom is already generating the transcript, and in the cases below, people will have already agreed to being recorded AND zoom has features to save transcripts anyways. Maybe zoom could add a half sentence to the permission to record statement that says "and I agree to having a full transcript of this meeting saved" if they feel worried- but this should already be in place since people can save transcripts AND chat already. 

[marilynejackson]

It doesn't sound like Zoom is being receptive to this thread.  Google Meet has options as do other platforms to consider.

[edward-f]

Yes, I see this is an older request. I wanted to share my use case with the importance of the transcript to leverage AI capabilities. I think it will continue to gain importance. Just my take.

In the vein of other platforms, some of the recent updates to Google Meet have been quite impressive! Was testing them out.

[mvieve]

Thank you for the update, Brandon, and for your advocacy on this issue. However, I have to agree with dimsdale - the transcript is already created, and can be saved by pressing a button. What compliance concern could possibly allow transcripts to be saved with a single click but prohibit them from being saved automatically? I would really like to hear back from Zoom on that specific question.

Honestly, absent a clear and specific answer, I'll return to my assumption that Zoom is withholding autosave to help push AI—an actual compliance problem—onto everyone. 

[dimsdale]

>my assumption that Zoom is withholding autosave to help push AI—an actual compliance problem—onto everyone.

Good point, very good point. Totally checks out.  Zoom is pushing AI on the userbase as if its future depended on it. I'm sure the ability to even let the user save a transcript - at all - was only begrudgingly implemented. Keep all of the customer's data away from the customer and force them into your AI solution.  

This is not a product for me.