Live translation captions for Zoom meetings running in your Chrome browser tab, no bots to invite.
Zoom's desktop app is common, but if you open a Zoom meeting in Chrome instead—through the browser link Zoom offers when you click a meeting invite—Translext can capture that tab's audio and give you live captions in your language. The person speaking Swedish doesn't need to slow down. The team in Tokyo doesn't need to switch to English. You see what they're saying, translated in real time, overlaid on your Zoom window.
Zoom has auto-transcription for certain paid accounts, but it displays only the original language and requires the host to turn it on. Translext runs in your own browser tab. You control it. You pick the source language and the target language. No one else on the call sees your captions, and nothing about the meeting itself changes. When you close the tab, the translation is gone.
Translext only works if Zoom is open as a web page in Chrome. When you click a Zoom meeting link, you'll see a prompt asking whether to open the Zoom desktop app or join from your browser. Choose the browser option. Once the meeting loads in the tab, click the Translext extension icon and start the translation. The extension captures the tab's audio—voices, screen-share videos, anything playing through that tab—and displays captions over the Zoom interface. If you're used to the desktop app's gallery view or its keyboard shortcuts, the browser version feels slightly different: some features like virtual backgrounds or breakout rooms behave differently or require specific settings. But the core meeting works the same, and Translext can listen to it.
You're in a weekly standup where half the team speaks Spanish and half speaks English, and people code-switch without warning. You're joining a client call conducted entirely in French, a language you studied years ago but don't trust yourself to follow at full conversational speed. You're in a training webinar hosted in Mandarin, and you need to catch the technical details, not just the gist. Translext gives you a second track. You still hear the original audio—useful for tone, emphasis, and moments when the translation lags or stumbles—but the captions let you confirm what was actually said. It won't replace fluency, and it will misinterpret jargon or fast cross-talk sometimes, but it keeps you in the conversation instead of lost two minutes behind.
The captions appear as an overlay. You can drag them to a different part of the screen if they're blocking someone's video tile or the chat panel. Translext doesn't know who's speaking; it translates all audio coming through the tab as a single stream, so if three people talk over each other, the caption will be a jumbled mix. If someone shares their screen and plays a video, Translext will try to translate that too. You can pause and resume translation anytime. The extension uses your computer's processing, so an older machine with many tabs open might see slight delays. Translation quality depends on clarity: accented speech, background noise, or very technical vocabulary will produce rougher output. You can't save the transcript afterward; once the meeting ends and you close the tab, the captions are gone.
No. Translext is a Chrome extension that captures audio from a browser tab. The Zoom desktop app runs outside the browser, so the extension has no way to access its audio. You must join the Zoom meeting through the web browser option. When you click a Zoom link, decline the prompt to open the desktop app and choose 'join from your browser' instead. Once the meeting loads in a Chrome tab, Translext can listen to it.
No. Translext runs entirely in your browser. The captions appear only on your screen, overlaid on the Zoom interface. The host sees you as a normal participant. No bot joins the meeting, no notification appears in the participant list, and no recording indicator lights up. If the host has enabled Zoom's own live transcription feature, that will still appear separately for everyone in the meeting; your Translext captions are private and independent.
No. Translext translates audio only—what people are saying out loud through their microphones. It doesn't read or translate text from the Zoom chat panel, screen shares showing slides with text, or any other written content visible in the meeting. If someone types a question in the chat in another language, you'll need a separate tool to translate that text. Translext focuses on spoken conversation.
Translext will capture and attempt to translate that audio too, because it's coming through the same browser tab. If someone plays a promotional video in German during their screen share, you'll see captions for it. This can be helpful or distracting depending on the situation. If the shared audio overlaps with someone speaking, the captions will try to handle both streams at once, which often produces garbled output. You can pause translation temporarily if you want to ignore the shared content.
The delay is usually one to three seconds. You hear the original voice first, then the caption appears a moment later. This lag comes from the time needed to capture audio, transcribe it, translate it, and display it. In a fast back-and-forth discussion, captions from one speaker might still be appearing while the next person starts talking. The translation is live, not instant. If you're trying to interject or respond immediately, you'll often be working from what you heard rather than waiting for the caption to confirm it.
Live captions and translated audio for anything playing in your browser tab. No bots to invite, nothing to upload.