turning off & on live transcript during a zoom meeting

[TrackerDave]

The controls for managing the Live Transcript function have changed from last month.  It no longer seems possible to turn the Live Transcript off and back on during the meeting. Am I missing something here or is this no longer possible? I've started a meeting via the Windows desktop app and via FIrefox browser; appears to be the same case in both instances.

Thanks,

TrackerDave

[Ray_Harwood]

Hi, @TrackerDave,

It's been my experience (at least that I can recall!) that once someone initiates the captioning process, it is always available and won't be turned off.  You can stop your Zoom window from displaying the captions, but you can't stop the transcription process from occurring.  Just clicking the button causes the captions to alternate between Show and Hide.

Since the captioning process then allows for a historical transcript to be captured with the Cloud recording, and this might be essential for a Zoom host when uploading the video for viewers with hearing disabilities, it wouldn't be appropriate to stop the captioning just because nobody was actively displaying it.

Hopefully this helps explain the process a little better.

[TrackerDave]

Thanks for your input Ray. I'm actually not as much concerned with the CC as I am the Live Transcript.  During November 12th-18th I hosted Zoom meetings lasting 2 to 4 hours each. During the frequent breaks in these meetings I play music - and was able to turn off the Live Transcript during the breaks so that it didn't fill with nonsense as it tried to transcribe music lyrics:) I don't recall the effect it had on CC since I never view that onscreen.  This month (and I had updated Zoom prior to starting meetings) that Live Transcript on/off function doesn't seem to be there - the controls seem more centered on CC with the Live Transcript subordinate.  This may be moot however; I see that in the Dec. 19 release there will be the Meeting feature "Temporarily disable automated captions" - so hopefully this will effect the Live Transcript as well.

[Ray_Harwood]

Thanks, Dave. I’m not sure how the CC and Live Transcript features may or may not be tied together in a technical sense. Sounds like you’ve used them way more than I have!

Let me know here what you think about the Dec 19 release once you’ve checked it out. I’m sure there are others that might have the same issues and would appreciate your input. 

[TrackerDave]

Right on - I absolutely will Ray.

[Ajackphd]

For myself, I don’t care if someone wants to use live captions during g a meeting but I do t want any transcripts to be saved for later viewing by others. It’s a privacy issue. How do I disable the feature that saves the transcript while allowing live captions during g the meeting itself? 

[Ray_Harwood]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @Ajackphd.

 Go to Personal -> Settings and type Transcript in the search box:

Then scroll down to these settings:

I think disabling this will solve your problem. 

Just under that:

Look at the highlighted items and see if it makes sense to disable those as well. My understanding is that this would not interfere with viewing the closed captions live during your session, but I recommend testing this in a non-production session to confirm. 

[TrackerDave]

Ray's advice is good, I just have a comment:

I do not use cloud recordings; I record locally - gallery view on one laptop, speaker view on a 2nd laptop.  As my meetings often start 30 minutes prior to the event to give the presenters time to chat and plan in a breakout room, I don't have Zoom set to automatically record.  I recently forgot to hit record on both computers until an hour into the meeting.  Luckily I had the live transcript running.  I edited the live transcript for errors and flow, then created a voice modeled after existing speaker audio samples I had from previous recordings, and then generated the text-to-speech .mp3 file in increments of 5,000 characters or less (a limitation of elevenlabs.io service level I have) and had a usable audio recording to take the place of the non-recorded first hour of the meeting.  

So you may want to consider keeping the live transcript feature enabled, with the appropriate control settings applied, as a failsafe.  Just a thought.