New for Spring 2025, automated captions are now enabled by default for all users system wide in Zoom. Previously, this setting required hosts to manually enable it for every meeting, which sometimes required participants with accessibility needs to directly ask for this functionality to be enabled in advance of the meeting.

Meeting hosts may still opt-out of captioning in their Zoom account settings, by navigating to the section titled Meeting >> In Meeting (Advanced):

Note that "automated captions" and "save captions" are separate settings, in case instructors are considering disabling captioning for confidentiality or similar reasons. If "Save captions" is toggled off, meeting participants can't save or capture captions and transcripts. 

Locking the caption language

An issue has been identified where any user in-meeting can change the captioning language for all users. In testing this has not been found to seriously affect caption quality, but it can cause users to briefly see non-English characters as the captions are parsed for display. To avoid this issue, there are two things meeting hosts can do:

1. Lock the caption language in-meeting: Unfortunately this cannot be performed in advance, it must be done once the meeting has started. The host only needs to click the arrow next to the CC icon, and select Host caption control settings:
              
   
   
2. Enable translation in Zoom settings (below the automated captions setting in the section titled Meeting >> In Meeting (advanced) - This allows individuals to set their own speaking language and caption settings in your meetings and can enable speakers of different languages to communicate by having translated captions automatically applied. This has an additional effect of prompting users to choose their speaking language if any user in the meeting enables translation. These settings may be remembered for next time but it's recommended that the host enable translation when the meeting starts to prevent any abrupt pop-ups for participants for the rest of the meeting. Also note that if translation is left enabled in-meeting, it will remain enabled at the start of the host's next meeting.