Adding Captions to Videos in Panopto

Panopto’s built-in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) feature makes it easy to caption videos to make them accessible to people with hearing impairments and many others who find captions useful . The captions can then be refined manually.

Operating System: All

Applies To: UB faculty and staff

Last Updated: August 13, 2025

Disability Accommodations

If students in your class require captions as a disability accommodation, have the student contact the Office of Accessibility Resources and UBIT can order human-generated captions for your course recordings.

Generate captions within Panopto

  1. Generate captions:
    • As of September 4, 2020 any new folder created in Panopto will have ASR captioning turned on by default, so any video uploaded to the folder will have ASR captions added automatically.
    • For recordings in folders created before September 4, 2020 you need to direct Panopto to generate captions for your session by following the steps in Panopto’s article, ASR Generated Captions.
  2. Refine the accuracy of those captions by following the steps in Panopto’s article, How to Edit or Delete Captions

Add Zoom transcript or closed captions to Panopto recording

  1. Download the Zoom Audio transcripts or Closed Captions file. This will be a .vtt file.
    • In Zoom
      1. Go to Recordings > click the title of the recording > download the Audio transcript or Closed Caption file.
      2. The Audio transcript is created automatically for Zoom cloud recordings
      3. It will have a name similar to,
        “GMT20210520-141357_Recording.transcript.vtt”
      4. The Closed Caption file comes from captions that were done live by the auto-transcript feature or by a real person.
      5. The Closed Caption file will have a name similar to,
        “GMT20210520-141357_Recording.cc.vtt”
  2. Delete current captions from the recording in Panopto (if they are present)
    • In Panopto
      1. Go to the recording to which you want to add captions
      2. Settings > Captions
      3. Under Available Captions open the triangle beside Default or English > click Delete Captions
  3. Upload the Zoom .vtt file to the Panopto recording
    • In Panopto
      1. Go to the recording to which you want to add captions
      2. Settings > Captions
      3. Under Upload Captions > click Choose File and navigate to the caption file you wish to upload
      4. Click Upload Captions
      5. The file will process to embed the new captions

Download a transcript or captions

Viewers and creators who want a transcript of a recording without the caption timestamps can download a transcript while viewing the recording.

Creators who want a caption file with timestamps can download it by going into the settings for a recording. In the Captions section, select the dropdown arrow beside the caption language and download the file.

See also

Still need help?

Contact the UBIT Help Center.