Method 2: Run a dedicated captioning platform alongside Meet
Meet's built-in captions are good for internal use. Where they fall short:
Accuracy is bounded by Meet's general-purpose model. There's no per-meeting custom vocabulary, so technical product names, internal acronyms, and unusual proper nouns can be mis-transcribed. Translation only runs on Workspace Business Standard plans and above. Transcripts (full, searchable text) require Gemini for Google Workspace, which is a separate add-on. The on-screen caption rendering doesn't have the bookmark/share/copy controls attendees expect from a dedicated viewer.
When any of those limits matter — and especially for webinars, panels, conference sessions, and any event that becomes content afterwards — running a dedicated captioning platform alongside Meet produces meaningfully better captions, real-time translation across more languages, a shareable searchable transcript at a stable URL, and engagement metrics on the caption viewers.
EventRecast is one platform that fits this pattern. It captures meeting audio from the host machine while Meet runs in another tab; captions stream to attendees on a separate viewer URL shared in the meeting chat.
Which method to pick
For internal team meetings, all-hands calls, customer support meetings — Google Meet's built-in captions are sufficient. The marginal benefit of a dedicated platform doesn't justify the extra setup for those use cases.
For webinars, customer-facing events, panels, fireside chats, and any meeting where the transcript will be repurposed (recap email, blog post, sales follow-up) — a dedicated platform delivers more usable output. The transcript becomes a content asset; the engagement analytics tell you which moments landed.
For events with international audiences, dedicated platforms with viewer-side language selection (each attendee picks their language) are typically a better experience than Meet's per-attendee translation language setting, especially when more than two or three languages are involved.
What about Gemini-generated meeting summaries?
Google Workspace plans with Gemini can produce a 'Take notes for me' meeting summary that captures key points and action items. This is comparable to AI summaries from dedicated captioning platforms but ties you to the Google Workspace ecosystem.
If you're already on Workspace with Gemini and the summaries meet your needs, that's a perfectly reasonable single-platform setup. If you want richer post-event content (timestamped transcripts, multi-language translation of the summary, custom vocabulary, embeddable transcripts on a public page), a dedicated platform usually wins.
