How to turn off transcription in Zoom

Turn it off in the Zoom web portal, not in the desktop app. Sign in, go to Settings, open the Meeting tab, scroll to In Meeting (Advanced), and switch off Meeting transcript. That stops the saved transcript for the meetings you host. Captions and AI Companion are two more switches in two other places, and turning one off does nothing to the other two. That is the part people get wrong, and it got harder in May 2026 when Zoom deleted the two settings most guides still tell you to click.

Which switch stops which thing

Four separate Zoom features turn speech into text. Here is where each one lives and what it leaves running.

The four things people call Zoom transcription

Most of the confusion is vocabulary. These are four different features with four different owners, and Zoom's help pages are written one feature at a time.

• Live captions, which Zoom now calls automated captions, are the words that appear at the bottom of the video during the call. They are an accessibility feature. Since May 2026 they are live only: you can scroll back about three minutes, and nobody can save or download them.
• The meeting transcript is the saved speech-to-text record. It is the thing that persists after the call, and it is what you actually want off if you are here for privacy reasons.
• The cloud recording audio transcript is a separate VTT file Zoom generates from a cloud recording on a paid plan. It rides along with the recording, under its own setting.
• AI Companion is Zoom's assistant. It writes summaries and action items rather than a verbatim record, it runs in Zoom's cloud, and it is switched on and off in a completely different tab.

If you want the opposite of this page, the enabling side is covered in how to transcribe a Zoom meeting, and questions about where an existing transcript ended up belong in where Zoom transcripts are saved.

Turning off the saved transcript

Sign in to the Zoom web portal in a browser, click Settings, open the Meeting tab, and scroll to the In Meeting (Advanced) section. Switch Meeting transcript off. There is no equivalent control in the Zoom Workplace desktop app, which is why people hunt through the app menus and find nothing.

If you would rather keep transcripts available but tighten them, the same setting has sub-options worth reading: Automatically generate transcripts for, which decides whether every meeting gets one or only meetings with a summary; a retention control that deletes transcripts after a set number of days; whether hosts can view and manage transcripts after the meeting; whether all participants can view the transcript during it; and who is allowed to save one to their computer.

Zoom states plainly that transcripts are not enabled by default and a host or an admin has to turn them on. So if your meetings are being transcribed, somebody made that choice, and it is reversible.

Why the setting a guide told you to click is missing

Between May 24 and May 26, 2026, Zoom rebuilt this whole corner of the settings. Three settings were deleted outright: Full transcript and Save captions, both under Meeting, In Meeting (Advanced), and the option allowing users to retain and manage transcripts generated by AI Companion features, under Recording and Transcript. They were replaced by the single Meeting transcript setting, and existing configurations were migrated across.

That one change is why so much published advice no longer works. Search results for this question are full of university IT pages telling you to disable Full transcript and Save captions, and those checkboxes are not there any more. If a guide names either of them, it was written before May 26, 2026, and you can stop reading it.

The change also settled a question people used to ask constantly. Captions can no longer be turned into a file. Zoom's position now is that captions are for live accessibility and transcripts are the saved record, so the only thing that produces a keepable document is the Meeting transcript setting. Turning captions off does not stop a transcript, and turning the transcript off does not stop captions.

Turning off live captions

Captions have their own toggle in the same section: Settings, Meeting tab, In Meeting (Advanced), Automated captions. Switch it off and the captions button stops appearing in your meetings. There is also a narrower option inside that setting which restricts who can start captions to the host, or the host and co-host, if you want them available but controlled.

Mid-meeting, a host who has already started captions can kill them for the room. Click the up arrow next to the captions icon, choose Host caption control settings, and turn off Allow closed captioning for this meeting.

There is a middle option almost nobody writes about. Alongside Automated captions sits Automated captions on device, which lets supported clients process captions on the machine instead of sending audio to Zoom for transcription. It needs the Zoom Workplace desktop app at version 6.5.3 or later. If your objection is to the cloud rather than to captions themselves, that is the setting to look at first.

Turning off the cloud recording transcript

This one has lived in the same place for years and was untouched by the May 2026 change. Go to Settings, then the Recording tab, called Recording and Transcript at the account level. Under Advanced cloud recording settings, clear the Create audio transcript checkbox and save. Admins find the same control under Account Management, Account Settings, and for a group under User Management, Groups.

Two things follow from that. It only ever applied to cloud recordings on a paid plan, so a local recording never had a transcript to switch off. And clearing it stops the transcript, not the recording. The call is still being recorded.

Turning off AI Companion

AI Companion is the one people miss, because it is not in the Meeting tab at all. In the web portal, open Settings and click the AI Companion tab, then turn off Meeting Summary with AI Companion. Check the other AI features on that tab while you are there, including meeting questions, since they are individually switched. At the account level an admin can disable Zoom AI for everyone in one move, which grays out every toggle underneath.

In a live call, the host can click the sparkle icon in the top right corner and choose Stop AI Companion. That is worth knowing as a host, because a participant who objects mid-meeting has no way to do it themselves.

What you can do when you are not the host

Honestly, very little, and the pages that imply otherwise are selling comfort. As a participant you can click the captions icon and hide the subtitles, but that is cosmetic. It changes what is on your screen and has no effect on the transcript, the summary, or anything Zoom keeps.

There is one real in-product route. When a transcript is running, participants see a blinking Transcript icon at the top of the meeting window; hover it and click Ask host to stop transcription. That sends the host a request. They can say no.

AI Companion goes further than most people expect. When a host turns it on, Zoom shows every attendee a consent message saying the meeting will be transcribed and summarized, and until you accept it you cannot unmute or switch your camera on. There is no per-participant opt-out that lets you stay in the call and be excluded from the transcript. Your options are to ask the host to turn it off, stay muted with your camera off, or leave. That is a real gap in the product, and it is worth saying out loud rather than papering over.

When the toggle is grayed out

A grayed-out setting is not a bug and not a plan limit. Zoom lets an account owner or admin click a lock icon next to most of these settings, which freezes the value for everyone below them. Lock it at the account level and it is fixed for groups and users. Lock it at the group level and it is fixed for that group's members.

So if Meeting transcript, Automated captions or Create audio transcript will not move for you, the setting has been decided above your head and the fix is a conversation with whoever administers your Zoom account. Nothing in the client will override it.

If you still want the words, keep them on your Mac

Zoom's transcript is genuinely useful. That is the awkward part of this page: the reason people leave it on is that reading a call beats rewatching it, and switching it off costs you something real. The objection is usually not to the text existing. It is to the text living in a vendor's cloud, under someone else's retention policy, searchable by an admin you have never met.

Those are separable. You can turn Zoom's cloud transcription off and still end up with a transcript, by taking it from your own machine instead. On a Mac, ScreenCaptureKit can capture the audio your speakers are already playing, with no virtual audio driver and nothing joining the participant list.

That is what I built Parameety to do. It sits in the menu bar, captures the meeting's system audio through ScreenCaptureKit, optionally mixes in your mic, and when you stop it transcribes on the machine with Parakeet and writes a Markdown file to ~/Documents/Parameety. The audio is discarded once the text exists, nothing is uploaded, and no admin setting governs it because it never touches your Zoom account. The trade is real: it is a verbatim transcript with no speaker labels and no summary, it captures audio rather than video, and it needs Apple Silicon on macOS 15 or later.

One thing this is not. It is not a way around a host who has turned transcription off, and it is not a way to record people who have not been told. Say you are taking a transcript before you start, the same as you would expect from anyone else in the call. If you want the capture side in full, see how to record meetings on a Mac, and getting a transcript without keeping a recording covers what each platform holds on to.

These paths were current in August 2026

Every settings path here came from Zoom's current support documentation in August 2026, not from memory, because this specific area of Zoom moved three months ago and stale paths are the main failure mode of articles on this topic. The dates and the list of deleted settings come from Zoom's own FAQ on the May 2026 caption and transcript update. What I cannot see is your account: plan differences and admin locks decide which of these toggles you can actually reach, so if a path here does not match your portal, the lock icon is the first thing to check.

FAQ

Why is my Zoom meeting being transcribed?

Because the host or an account admin switched it on. Zoom's own documentation says transcripts are not enabled by default and somebody has to turn them on. Three separate features can put that notice on your screen: the Meeting transcript setting, automated captions running live, and AI Companion writing a summary. Each has its own toggle in a different part of the web portal, so a host can honestly believe they turned transcription off while one of the other two is still running.

How do I disable AI transcribe on Zoom?

AI Companion is governed separately from captions and from the meeting transcript, so switching those off leaves it running. In the Zoom web portal, open Settings, click the AI Companion tab, and turn off Meeting Summary with AI Companion along with the other AI features listed there. During a call, the host can click the sparkle icon in the top right and choose Stop AI Companion. An admin can also switch AI features off for the whole account, and then every toggle below is grayed out.

Can a participant turn off transcription in Zoom?

No. You can hide the subtitles on your own screen by clicking the captions icon, but that changes what you see and nothing else; the transcript and the summary keep running. If a transcript is active you can hover the blinking Transcript icon at the top of the window and click Ask host to stop transcription, which is a request the host can refuse. When AI Companion is on, Zoom shows a consent message and blocks you from unmuting or turning on your camera until you accept it. Speaking up or leaving is the only real opt-out.

Does turning off captions also stop the Zoom transcript?

Not any more. Since May 26, 2026 Zoom treats captions as a live accessibility feature and the transcript as the saved record, and they run off different settings. Captions can no longer be saved or downloaded by anyone: you can scroll back about three minutes during the call, and after that they are gone for good. The saved record now comes only from the Meeting transcript setting under Meeting, In Meeting (Advanced), and it has to be switched off there on its own.