Turn on captions during a meeting — they work in Czech too

A colleague with a quiet mic, a lecturer who swallows the ends of sentences, or simply a call from a café without headphones — situations where you miss part of a meeting happen to everyone. Few people know that Teams, Zoom, and Meet can all display live captions: a transcript of what's currently being said, running at the bottom of the screen with a one- or two-second delay. And crucially — Czech is already among the supported languages (though still in beta quality on some services). Only you see the captions; nobody else on the call can tell you have them on.

How to do it

Teams: during a meeting, click More (…) → Language and speech → Turn on live captions. Then, in the caption settings, choose the spoken language that matches what's actually being spoken at the meeting — Czech for a Czech-language meeting.

Zoom: click Captions in the bottom bar and turn them on; choose the spoken language in settings. Zoom lists Czech as a beta language — usable for a regular meeting, just expect occasional mishearings.

Meet: click the captions (cc) icon in the bottom bar and select a language. Czech is available here too, and, as with newer languages generally, in beta mode.

The key is setting the language that's actually being spoken — captions don't translate (translation is a separate, usually paid-plan feature), they only transcribe. A mismatched language setting produces nonsense that tempts people to give up on the feature.

A typical scenario

A student is watching an online lecture from their dorm room while a party rages on the other side of the wall. With captions on, he doesn't miss a single passage lost to the noise — and when he needs to finish a note, he just glances at the last few lines of the transcript instead of rewinding. Captions help a manager the same way at a hybrid meeting, where half the people sit far from the conference mic and their voices get lost.

What you get out of it

You stop interrupting calls with “sorry, can you say that again?” and can handle meetings even in environments where relying on hearing alone wouldn't work. For anyone hard of hearing, or for meetings in a foreign language, captions are genuinely essential — reading English is a good deal easier for most Czechs than listening to it through a bad microphone. And because only you see the captions, you don't have to explain yourself to anyone: you just turn them on and the meeting carries on.

Pro tip

Captions are useful for the speaker too: when you're presenting in English, turning on English captions immediately shows you whether the machine — and therefore probably the audience too — understands you. A word the transcript consistently mangles is probably one you're pronouncing unclearly for people as well.

Need a full record instead of just captions? That's what automatic meeting transcripts are for.