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Live captions

Enable live captions so that your audience can read along with your webinar.

Dewi avatar
Written by Dewi
Updated this week

WebinarGeek has a built-in option for AI transcription of webinars, meaning that spoken words are turned into text. This is perfect for accessibility, allowing your audience to read along with your webinar. It ensures that your story is always clear.

Live captions are only available in Premium and Enterprise plans.

If you upgrade from a Basic plan, all recordings made after December 1st, 2024 will get captions retroactively.

If available, captions are enabled for your replays, automated and on demand webinars by default. If you want to disable them, please follow the steps outlined here.

Enabling live captions for your webinar

In order for your audience to be able to toggle their live captions, you’ll first have to make sure live captions are enabled for your webinar.

From the webinar wizard, before the webinar

  1. Edit the webinar you want to enable live captions for

  2. Go to ‘Webinar'

  3. Go to ‘Settings’

  4. Toggle the switch next to ‘Allow participants to see live captions’

Setting that permits participants to toggle live captions

In the streaming page, during the webinar

  1. Open your webinar’s streaming page

  2. Click ‘Enter webinar’

  3. Click ‘Settings’

  4. Choose ‘Caption settings’

    Opening the 'Caption settings' in the webinar page

  5. Toggle the switch next to ‘Allow viewers to view the live transcription’

Toggling viewers' ability to see live captions in the webinar page

Disabling live captions for your webinar

You can keep live captions disabled if you don’t want your audience to be able to see them.

From the webinar wizard, before the webinar

  1. Edit the webinar you want to disable live captions for

  2. Go to ‘Webinar’

  3. Go to ‘Settings’

  4. Toggle the switch next to ‘Allow participants to see live captions’

Setting that permits participants to toggle live captions

In the streaming page, during the webinar

  1. Open your webinar’s streaming page

  2. Click ‘Enter webinar’

  3. Click ‘Settings’

  4. Choose ‘Caption settings’

    Opening the 'Caption settings' in the webinar page

  5. Toggle the switch next to ‘Allow viewers to view the live transcription’

Toggling viewers' ability to see live captions in the webinar page

Captions in replays, automated and on demand webinars

Any recordings made with WebinarGeek will have their captions saved, which means they can be used for replays, automated and on demand webinars that use that recording.

If you create a recording with WebinarGeek while you have a Basic plan, then upgrade to a Premium or Enterprise subscription later, the recordings you made while you were using the Basic plan will also have live captions available for as long as you have the Premium or Enterprise plan.

In other words, we save the transcript for any webinar you host, even if you currently have a Basic plan. You can then use the captions when you upgrade to a Premium or Enterprise plan.

Please note! Videos recorded externally don’t receive captions. They’re only available for webinars/recordings made in WebinarGeek.

Toggling captions for replays, automated and on demand webinars

Any recording with captions available will have them enabled by default, allowing viewers to enable or disable them at will. If you want to disable (or enable) captions for a replay, automated or on demand webinar, you have to do so in the settings of the recording itself. Follow these steps:

  1. Click ‘Videos’ at the top of the screen

  2. Find the video you want to toggle the captions for

  3. Click ‘Options’

  4. Click ‘Edit details’

    Opening the settings for a video

  5. Use the checkbox next to ‘Allow viewers to see captions’ to toggle the video’s captions

Configuring whether viewers can see captions for a video or not

Viewing transcripts for recordings

You can always review the transcript(s) for your recording(s) from the ‘Videos’ page.

  1. Click ‘Videos’ at the top of the screen

  2. Find the video you want to review the transcript of

  3. Click ‘Options’

  4. Click ‘Transcript’

Opening the transcript for a video

How it works

WebinarGeek’s live captions are generated by AI, transcribing what you say during your webinar.

The language for the live captions is detected during the initial moments of the webinar, prioritizing the language the webinar is configured in.

Tips for better live captions

If you’re struggling with the accuracy of your live captions, it’s most likely due to the quality of your webinar audio. Background noise, for example, greatly interferes with the software’s ability to recognize what you’re saying.

What we can recommend:

  • A professional microphone for better audio quality

  • A space designed for recording/broadcasting to minimize background noise

  • Use ear- or headphones so that your microphone doesn’t ‘hear’ your loudspeakers

Supported languages

Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Asturian, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Burmese, Castilian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, Flemish, French, Western Frisian, Fulah, Gaelic, Galician, Ganda, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Iloko, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Letzeburgesch, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Moldavian, Moldovan, Mongolian, Myanmar, Nepali, Norwegian, Nynorsk, Occitan, Oriya, Panjabi, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Pushto, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swati, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Valencian, Vietnamese, Welsh, Wolof, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zulu

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