At Zoomtopia 2021, the company debuted a lot of cool new features and capabilities for the Zoom webconferencing tool. Here are only a few:

New transcription languages

They’re adding 30 additional languages to be supported by transcription.

Gmail integrations

You can see who accepted or declined the Zoom meeting invite right from the meeting itself, instead of going to your separate calendar window.

Slide management

Multiple people can now advance slides! So, instead of hearing a “Next slide, please” when the presenter and the meeting host are not the same person, multiple people can be in charge of the slides!

Be on the lookout for more updates as they come. You can expect all of these updates to be integrated in your Zoom client sometime between now and next year!

In a victory for accessibility advocates everywhere, and especially to the delight of the AccessMU team, we are excited to announce that automatic transcriptions are now available in our Zoom instance!

To enable these live captions, you’ll need to flip a switch in your Zoom settings:

Note: To enable auto transcriptions, you will need to be running the latest version of Zoom, so please check to make sure your app is up to date!

Note 2: Only the HOST can enable and disable the automatic transcriptions.

In the Settings menu, under “Accessibility,” make sure the box next to “Closed captioning is available” has a blue checkmark.

Then during your meetings, you will see a button labeled “CC” — select that and then “Enable Auto Transcription.”

One thing to remember is that these are transcriptions provided by artificial intelligence — there is no “live” person in the back end of your Zoom call providing a typed transcript. As such, there may be some mistakes as the technology learns.

And that’s it!

Important caveat:

Automatic transcription is currently not accurate enough to be used in any cases where a person with a disability requests a captioning accommodation.  For more information about providing student accommodations, please contact the Miller Center for Student Disability Services.

This update is for the group of folks in the Miami IT Slack instance. The Zoom plug-in has been enabled in Slack by our administrators, and you can now go zooming right along straight from the window you use the most.

Check out this helpful video for information on how to use the plug-in.

Please check the update notes on the Zoom website for details about the October upgrade!

New updates for the Zoom Client, October 12, 2020

Hot off the presses! Zoom has just rolled out four new features that educators can use to improve the remote learning experience. Update your Zoom client to access these latest features:

• Virtual seating charts
• Multi-pinning for better support for deaf and hard-of-hearing students (students can pin an interpreter so that they can see their teacher at the same time)
• Multi-spotlight for presenting group work
• Unmute with Consent (teachers can ask to unmute their students once and have that permission carried over into other classes hosted by that same teacher)

Read more about it on the Zoom Blog!

If you want to host a meeting with hundreds of participants, Zoom Webinar is an easy way to engage with an audience without unnecessary distractions. Webinar hosts can designate a few participants (panelists) to share screens and audio content. Webinars do allow hosts to unmute attendees, but in general participants are mostly there to listen to one or more presenters.

Webinars are ideal for large audiences or events that are open to the public. Typically, webinar attendees do not interact with one another. This is a great idea for events like panel events or featured readings. Not sure how you should host your event? Zoom has great content on their site about whether you should choose a Meeting or Webinar.

In our Miami domain, we have two available licenses. That means you need to request permission to host a webinar.

Request a Zoom Webinar.

Also see this blog post about participant limits in all of our web conferencing tools, including Webex, Zoom, and Google Meet.

This is a quick one for your Tuesday Remote Tools Update.

HD video is now available in 1-on-1 Zoom meetings. Huzzah! Now you can see your classmates and coworkers in better, crisper quality.

Note: This only applies to 1-on-1 meetings for the time being. To preserve bandwidth in light of the COVID-19 situation, Zoom is restricting full and standard HD.

Please be sure to use the desktop application in order to take advantage of HD during your Zoom meetings.

Further reading: more of the nuts and bolts about HD video and prerequisites on Zoom’s support blog.

Attendee calling in to Zoom Webinars doesn’t work properly at the moment, so they have disabled that function.

In the meantime, attendees may connect to Webinar audio through the Zoom desktop client, web client, or mobile app. Panelists are unaffected; this is only for attendees.

You can read more about this on Zoom’s status page.

They say they are hoping to turn on this capability again in the next few weeks. Sorry for the inconvenience!