Zoom Adds Translated Captions As a Paid Add-On

We're breaking past language barriers, as live translated captions are already coming to Microsoft Teams as well.
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Zoom is adding translated captions, designed to translate a speaker’s language in real time in order to caption a Zoom meeting so that everyone can understand everyone else.

There’s a catch: The feature is only available for paid plans, and it will cost an extra $5 per month, per user on top of the standard monthly fee. 12 languages are currently supported.

Still, it’s an impressive feature that can help businesses work across the language barrier when reaching out to new markets, or can help make an all-hands meeting more accessible for workforces in which not everyone speaks the same first language.

What to Know

A “universal translator” was once a science fiction concept you’d only find in Star Trek or a Douglas Adams novel. Granted, we still haven’t created audio translations in real-time, and when we do, they’ll definitely sound like that robotic TikTok narrator voice. But until then, we have Zoom’s new captioning ability.

The 12 languages that will be supported initially are Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean — although the final three are still in beta.

It’s available to paying users from within the Zoom web portal, where the functionality can be turned on and users can set what their preferred languages are.

Once turned on by the host, the captions will be available to all participants for meetings or webinars. Each user will be able to pick the language they want, so everyone can customize which language best accomodates them. Users could even change the captions to a secondary language they want to brush up on if they want.

In addition, full transcripts can be toggled on during meetings, so that the text is displayed in a right-hand sidebar window.

Zoom’s Not the Only Service With Translated Captions

Live translated captions are already coming to Microsoft Teams as well, making this another example of competing software services continually keeping up with each other’s increasingly large featuresets.

We’ve rated the two video communication tools in the past, and you can check out this comparison page to see the core differences between the two.

The short version: Zoom’s a little bit better, but you’ll probably be pretty happy with either one. And now, you’ll be able to chat with someone in another language with either one, as well.

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Written by:
Adam is a writer at Tech.co and has worked as a tech writer, blogger and copy editor for more than a decade. He was a Forbes Contributor on the publishing industry, for which he was named a Digital Book World 2018 award finalist. His work has appeared in publications including Popular Mechanics and IDG Connect, and his art history book on 1970s sci-fi, 'Worlds Beyond Time,' is out from Abrams Books in July 2023. In the meantime, he's hunting down the latest news on VPNs, POS systems, and the future of tech.
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