How to Transcribe a Zoom Meeting: Free and Paid Options

You can transcribe a Zoom meeting in three built-in ways, all of which need a paid plan from $14.16 per user per month: the in-meeting transcript panel, the cloud recording transcript, or the meeting summary. On a free account, record the meeting locally and transcribe the file with an external tool, because since May 2026 Zoom captions can no longer be saved.

That is the short version. The long version matters because Zoom changed the rules this year. Captions and transcripts used to be the same feature with two names. Now they are two different things with different plans, different languages and different files. People who relied on "save captions" for a free transcript found that option gone in late May 2026.

This guide walks through every method that works in September 2026: what each one costs, who can start it, which languages it supports and what file you end up with. It also covers how to transcribe a Zoom meeting as a participant, how accurate the result will be, and what to tell people before you press the button.

Table of Contents

• What Changed in 2026: Captions Are Not Transcripts Anymore
• Every Way to Transcribe a Zoom Meeting at a Glance
• Method 1: Turn On Zoom's Meeting Transcript (Paid Plans)
• Method 2: Get a Transcript From a Cloud Recording
• Method 3: Use the Meeting Summary Instead of a Full Transcript
• Method 4: Transcribe a Zoom Recording for Free
• Method 5: How to Transcribe a Zoom Meeting as a Participant
• Method 6: Transcribe and Translate at the Same Time
• Free vs Paid: What You Actually Get
• How Accurate Is a Zoom Transcript?
• Consent, Privacy and Retention Before You Transcribe
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Which Method Fits Your Meeting

What Changed in 2026: Captions Are Not Transcripts Anymore

Zoom rolled out a split between captions and transcripts between May 24 and May 26, 2026, according to its own help center FAQ on the change. Captions are the live text at the bottom of the screen. They stay free on every account and cover about 50 languages, including German and Turkish. What you can no longer do is keep them: from May 18, 2026, participants cannot save or download captions as a post-meeting file.

Transcripts are now a separate, saved record. A host or admin has to turn them on explicitly, they live in their own settings section, and they come with retention rules such as "delete after a set number of days." The catch for budget-minded users is that the meeting transcript requires a Pro, Business or Enterprise account.

One more naming change: Zoom retired the "AI Companion" brand in mid-2026. The features did not disappear. Meeting summary, transcript and related tools now appear under their own names in the Zoom Workplace settings. If an older guide tells you to "open AI Companion," look for the individual feature name instead.

Every Way to Transcribe a Zoom Meeting at a Glance

The table below compares all six methods this guide covers. Prices come from Zoom's public pricing page and help center as of September 2026; check them before you buy, because they change.

If you only remember one row: on a free Basic account, the built-in transcript options do not apply. Method 4 is your free route, Method 3 gives you three summaries a month, and Method 6 is the route for meetings in more than one language.

Method 1: Turn On Zoom's Meeting Transcript (Paid Plans)

The meeting transcript is the new, official way to get a saved text record without recording video. It runs from the same speech recognition as captions, so it supports the same languages, but it saves to a file.

Step 1: Enable transcripts in the web portal

Sign in to the Zoom web portal and go to Settings, then the Meeting tab, then the In Meeting (Advanced) section. Turn on the Meeting transcript toggle. Account owners and admins can do this for the whole account or a group; individual licensed users can do it for themselves unless the admin has locked the setting.

Step 2: Decide who can view and save

In the same section you will find the options that decide what happens to the text. You can allow all participants to view the transcript during the meeting, and you can choose who may save it to their computer: host only, host and co-hosts, everyone except guests, everyone from specific IP ranges, or all participants. There is also an option to generate transcripts automatically for every meeting, or only for meetings that have a summary, and a retention rule that deletes transcripts after a number of days.

Step 3: Start it in the meeting

In the meeting toolbar click More, then Transcript. The Transcript panel opens on the right and fills as people speak. Participants who cannot see it can click Request transcription; the host gets a prompt to approve or decline.

Step 4: Save the file

At the bottom of the Transcript panel click Save transcript. Zoom writes a .TXT file to your Documents/Zoom folder on Windows, macOS or Linux. Two limits to know: transcripts cannot be shared directly through Zoom, so you send the file yourself, and the host can view and manage transcripts after the meeting only if the admin enabled that option.

Method 2: Get a Transcript From a Cloud Recording

Cloud recording transcription is the older route and still the best one if you also want the video. It produces a timestamped VTT file that you can edit line by line in the web portal.

1. Go to Settings, then the Recording tab, and confirm Cloud recording is on. Basic accounts do not have cloud recording, which is why this method needs a Pro, Business, Education or Enterprise account.
2. Under Advanced cloud recording settings, tick Create audio transcript and save.
3. In the meeting, click Record and choose Record to the Cloud.
4. After the meeting, open Recordings in the web portal. The transcript appears as a separate VTT file once processing finishes, usually some time after the video itself.
5. Click the transcript to edit wrong words, then download it or let viewers of the recording see it.

The single biggest limitation is language. Zoom's help article on audio transcription states that audio transcription only supports English. If your meeting is in Spanish, German or Turkish, use Method 1 or an external tool. The second limitation is that this feature applies to cloud recordings only, never to computer recordings saved to your device.

Storage is the other practical constraint. Pro and Business plans include 10 GB of cloud recording storage per user or license. A one-hour meeting with video typically uses a few hundred megabytes, so most teams are fine, but frequent recorders should delete old files or enable auto-delete.

Method 3: Use the Meeting Summary Instead of a Full Transcript

Sometimes you do not want 9,000 words of verbatim text. You want the decisions and the next steps. Zoom's meeting summary does that from the same speech-to-text stream, and it does not require recording.

The summary arrives by email after the meeting and, if the admin allows meeting chats before and after the meeting, in the meeting's group chat as well. It works in several languages and, when people speak more than one language, produces the summary in the language most participants used, falling back to the host's language.

On the pricing page, the free Basic plan lists meeting summaries for three hosted meetings per month. Pro, Business and Enterprise list unlimited summaries. That makes the summary the only built-in transcription-adjacent feature a free account gets in 2026.

Treat it as a summary, not a record. The model chooses what to keep, and it can misattribute or compress a point. For anything contractual, pair it with a real transcript or a recording. Our guide to AI meeting notes explains how to check a generated summary before you send it to a client.

Method 4: Transcribe a Zoom Recording for Free

This is the route for free accounts, for old recordings, and for anyone who wants the audio to stay on their own machine. It relies on a fact many people miss: every Zoom account, including Basic, can record locally.

What a local recording gives you

A computer recording produces an MP4 video file, an M4A audio-only file, a chat.txt file with the chat messages, and on Windows an M3U playlist. It does not produce a transcript or a caption file; those only exist for cloud recordings. So the transcript has to come from a separate tool.

Step by step

1. Record the meeting with Record, then Record on this Computer. As a participant you need the host to grant you recording permission first.
2. After the meeting ends, Zoom converts the files and opens the folder, normally Documents/Zoom on Windows and Mac.
3. Pick the M4A file. It is smaller than the MP4 and transcribes just as well because the tool only needs the audio.
4. Choose a transcription tool. The three families are on-device apps built on open speech models, browser-based tools that also run the model locally, and cloud services that give you a number of free minutes per month before charging per minute or per seat.
5. Set the spoken language before you start. Auto-detect works for a single language and fails for meetings that switch languages mid-sentence.
6. Export as TXT or SRT, then read it once against the audio for names and numbers.

For a full comparison of tools that handle recordings, including which ones stay offline and which ones support speaker labels, see our guide to speech-to-text apps for meetings. If you have not recorded yet and want the platform-by-platform steps, our meeting recording guide covers them.

How free is free?

On-device tools are genuinely free after you install them; you pay in laptop time, and a one-hour recording can take several minutes on a recent laptop. Cloud services are free only up to their monthly cap. The privacy trade-off runs the other way: local processing never uploads the audio, which matters when the meeting contains client data or health information.

Method 5: How to Transcribe a Zoom Meeting as a Participant

Most guides assume you are the host. Often you are not, and the host has no interest in transcripts. You still have four options, in order of politeness.

Ask for the transcript. If the host's account has the meeting transcript enabled, click More, then Transcript, then Request transcription. The host sees a prompt and can approve it. If the host allowed participants to save, you get the .TXT file yourself.

Ask for recording permission. The host can grant you permission to record locally from the Participants panel. You then follow Method 4 with your own copy.

Transcribe on your own side. Some on-device transcription apps can capture the audio that plays through your speakers or a virtual audio device and transcribe it live. Nothing is uploaded to the meeting and nobody else sees a bot. Because this still records other people's words, the consent rules in the section below apply in full.

Bring a bot. AI note-taker services join the meeting as a separate participant. Since May 2026 many hosts see unknown bots as a risk and remove them, and some companies now ban them by policy. Ask before you invite one.

Method 6: Transcribe and Translate at the Same Time

Transcribing is only half of the job when your meeting has a German client, a Turkish supplier and an English-speaking team. Zoom's own answer is translated captions on paid plans, and captions, as noted above, are not saved.

In Meeyra, the transcript is a by-product of translation. When AI translation is on in a meeting, every sentence is stored with its original text, the detected language and the translations that were shown to the other participants. After the meeting, the host opens the Transcript view in the dashboard, where the AI summary sits above the sentence-by-sentence record. Everything runs in the browser, so external participants join with a link and no installation.

The honest limits: the transcript exists only when translation was active, it lives in the dashboard rather than as a downloadable file, and it is a Meeyra transcript, not a Zoom one. If the meeting must stay in Zoom, our guide on how to translate a Zoom meeting shows the options from the participant's side. New accounts get 60 minutes of AI translation free, which is enough to test a real call; the pricing page lists per-minute and subscription options for 42+ languages.

Free vs Paid: What You Actually Get

Here is the same information sorted by what you need rather than by method.

If you host fewer than four meetings a month and only need decisions, Basic plus the summary is enough. If you need a searchable, quotable text record every week, the Pro plan pays for itself in the first hour you do not spend typing notes. Our AI meeting transcription guide goes deeper on choosing between built-in and third-party tools.

How Accurate Is a Zoom Transcript?

Nobody publishes an official accuracy figure for Zoom transcripts, and marketing claims of "human parity" deserve suspicion. The most useful independent data comes from a study in ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing that tested eleven common speech recognition services on recorded university lectures. The full paper is on arXiv.

Its headline numbers translate directly to meeting transcripts:

• The average word error rate across all vendors was 7.0% for English. That is roughly 70 wrong or missing words in a 1,000-word segment.
• German recordings averaged 15.3%, more than double the English rate. Expect more editing for non-English meetings.
• Streaming transcription, which is what a live panel uses, had a higher error rate (10.9%) than batch transcription of a finished file (9.37%). A cloud recording transcript or an external tool run on the M4A file will usually beat the live panel.
• Results ranged from 0% to 53.8% depending on audio and vendor, so the recording conditions matter more than the brand.

Five habits that move you toward the low end:

1. Use a headset or a directional microphone; laptop mics pick up the room.
2. Set the spoken language before the meeting starts instead of relying on detection.
3. Have one person speak at a time. Crosstalk is the single biggest source of dropped words.
4. Spell unusual names and product terms in the chat so you can find and fix them later.
5. Edit the transcript once while the meeting is fresh; fixing names in the VTT editor takes minutes.

Consent, Privacy and Retention Before You Transcribe

A transcript is a written record of what people said, and in most jurisdictions that makes it personal data. Three rules keep you out of trouble.

Tell people, every time. Zoom shows a notice when a transcript or recording starts, but say it out loud too, especially with external guests. Several US states require the consent of all parties before a conversation is recorded, and rules differ by country. For participants in the EU, you need a legal basis under Article 6 of the GDPR; many European companies treat internal meetings as legitimate interest and ask external guests for explicit opt-in.

Decide where the file lives. A cloud transcript sits on Zoom's servers under your retention settings. A local .TXT sits in a Documents folder that syncs to whatever your laptop syncs to. An uploaded recording sits with a third party under its terms. Pick the one that matches the sensitivity of the meeting, and check the security practices of any tool you upload to.

Set an expiry. Both the meeting transcript and cloud recordings can auto-delete after a set number of days. Most teams keep transcripts for 30 to 90 days and archive only the summary. A transcript nobody needs is a liability, not an asset.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you transcribe a Zoom meeting for free?

Yes, but not with Zoom's own transcript on a Basic account. Record the meeting locally, which every account can do, then transcribe the M4A file with a free on-device tool or the free minutes of a cloud service. Basic accounts also get a meeting summary for three hosted meetings per month.

Can you transcribe a Zoom meeting without recording it?

Yes. The meeting transcript panel on Pro, Business and Enterprise plans creates a saved .TXT file without any video recording, and the meeting summary also works without recording. Only the cloud recording transcript requires a recording.

How do I transcribe a Zoom meeting after it has ended?

If it was recorded to the cloud with Create audio transcript enabled, the VTT file appears in Recordings after processing. If it was recorded locally, upload or open the M4A file in an external transcription tool. If it was not recorded at all, there is no audio to transcribe, so only your notes or a meeting summary remain.

Where does Zoom save the transcript?

Saved meeting transcripts go to the Documents/Zoom folder on Windows, macOS and Linux as a .TXT file. Cloud recording transcripts stay in the Recordings section of the web portal as a VTT file next to the video.

Does Zoom transcribe in languages other than English?

The meeting transcript and captions support around 50 languages, including German, Turkish, Spanish and Japanese. The cloud recording audio transcript is English only. Translated captions on paid plans show a translation live but cannot be saved.

Can a participant transcribe a Zoom meeting without being the host?

Partly. A participant can request the transcript from the host, ask for local recording permission, or run a transcription app on their own device. All three still require telling the other participants, and the host controls whether bots and recordings are allowed.

Is a meeting summary the same as a transcript?

No. A transcript is the full text of what was said; a summary is a model's selection of the main points and action items. Summaries are faster to read but can compress or misattribute statements, so keep a transcript for anything you might need to quote.

What happened to Zoom AI Companion?

Zoom stopped using the AI Companion name in 2026. Meeting summary, transcript and similar features continue under their own names on paid Zoom Workplace plans, with a limited summary allowance on the free plan.

Which Method Fits Your Meeting

Match the method to the meeting rather than the other way round. A weekly internal sync on a Pro plan wants the meeting transcript with auto-generate on and a 30-day expiry. A recorded training session wants the cloud recording transcript, edited once and attached to the video. A free-plan freelancer wants a local recording and an on-device tool. A participant who is not the host wants to ask first and record second.

A meeting where people speak two or three languages wants a transcript that already contains the translation. That is what Meeyra stores by default when translation is on, sentence by sentence, with a summary on top. Create a free account, turn on translation in your next call, and open the transcript from the dashboard when it ends. The first 60 minutes are on us.