About automatic closed captioning for live events

This feature requires an Advanced or Premium plan, or an Enterprise plan with the Events feature added.

ZenVideo Advanced, Premium, and Enterprise members can enable automated closed captions for virtual events during the setup process, making your content more accessible to your audience. 

In this article:

• Full Auto CC for live events
• Total stream time remaining
• Enhanced speech detection
• Additional notes

Full Auto CC for live events

Upon creating a new event, you can enable Automatic closed captions by using the toggle under Optional features.

After creating a live event, you can edit your Automatic closed captions settings by navigating to Settings > Production on the right-hand panel.

Closed captions will be disabled by default. Select the toggle switch to enable automatic captions for your stream.

What is the total stream time remaining, and how can I extend it?

The total stream time remaining displayed under the Automated closed captions setting indicates the total captioning time duration for which you can have automatic captions active on live events. 

⚠️Note: This total stream time metric only applies to live events. It does not impact automatic captions generated on videos you record, create, or upload. Read more at FAQ: Automatic closed captions.

• Premium and Advanced accounts include two hours of automatic captioning for live events per year. The two-hour refresh is available every year, starting on the date of your purchase. If you would like to add more hours of automatic captioning time to your Premium or Advanced membership, contact our team to learn about our Enterprise offerings.
• Enterprise accounts are granted 30 hours of captioning time per year. Any Enterprise user requiring additional captioning time should contact their account manager for further options.

If you surpass your captioning time limit mid-stream, captions will continue to display until you end your stream. After that, you will no longer be able to use automatic closed captions on live events until your membership renews. 

Example: An event with Auto CC enabled streamed for 3 hours, 58 minutes, and 39 seconds. Rather than stop captions mid-stream at two hours, ZenVideo continued displaying Auto CC for the duration of that particular stream. The negative figure in the screenshot below represents the amount of time they exceeded the 2-hour limit for Auto CC.

   

Enhanced speech detection

Enhanced speech detection involves advanced technologies that improve the clarity and accuracy of speech, which consists of:

• Filtering background noise
• Adapting to different accents
• Handling overlapping speech to ensure that the system can recognize and process the spoken words.

Below the language dropdown menu is the Enhanced speech detection field, where you can enter up to 50 words, separated by commas, that otherwise may not be automatically detected, such as people’s names, your business name, or technical jargon that will be spoken during your event. They will populate below the field for easy tracking.

After this, you can continue setting up your event and go live. Auto captions will display regardless of whether your content is from live cameras or a pre-recorded video. Viewers can access captions by selecting the [CC] button located at the bottom of the player.

⚠️ Note: Captions will not appear on the low-resolution preview player on the live preview page. To view your event with captions, open the event’s page on vimeo.com or your embedded player.

Once your event ends and your stream is archived, the automatic captions are saved with the video. You can access them by navigating to the video’s settings > Distribution > Subtitles. Here you can download the WebVTT file of your captions if needed (i.e. if you want to edit them) and upload a new file as you would for any other video on your account. 

Additional notes

• Automatic closed captions default to English, but also support French (FR), Spanish (SP), German (DE), and Portuguese (BR). You can only select one language to caption per event, but you can change it at any point before or during your stream.
• Automatically generated captions are labeled as "English (Autogenerated)” to clarify to viewers and distinguish them from manually uploaded captions.
• If you are simulcasting, the automatic captions on ZenVideo will not appear in your other destinations at this time.
• You can toggle Auto CC on and off while your event is live.
• Streaming a live event via HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) will display automatically generated closed captions on third-party HLS-compatible players.