Someone just asked you to "send the .vtt file" from a Zoom recording — a video editor, an accessibility office, a co-host putting captions on a class replay — and you have no idea what that means or whether you even have one. You open your Zoom recordings and see a pile of unfamiliar filenames. Nothing obviously says "the vtt."
What a .vtt file actually is
A .vtt is a WebVTT caption file — a W3C web standard built to drive closed captions in a video player, not to be read on its own. It's the machine-generated transcript of your meeting's spoken audio, chopped into short cue blocks, each with its own timestamp range and a line or two of text.
Zoom creates this file when the audio transcript feature is turned on — the "Create audio transcript" checkbox under the account's, group's, or your own Recording settings, in the Advanced cloud recording section. Once that's on, Zoom transcribes the audio after a cloud recording finishes and adds the result to the meeting's file list as a distinct file, which Zoom's own documentation describes as appearing "as a separate VTT file in the list of recorded meetings."
Two things about it are easy to miss. It's forward-only — turning the setting on doesn't generate a transcript for a meeting you already recorded before that point. And it depends on cloud recording being enabled for that same meeting; a local-only recording never gets a .vtt, because there's no cloud copy for Zoom to transcribe.
Where to find it — and why a share link sometimes doesn't have it
If it's your own recording, the .vtt lives in your own Zoom web portal: Recordings and Transcripts, the Cloud recordings tab, the meeting itself, then Audio Transcript in the list of files. Clicking Download saves it to your computer.
If instead you're trying to get it from a recording someone else shared with you — a share link, not your own account — that's the situation behind a real query we see: the transcript is missing from the link but shows up fine when the owner opens the recording themselves. That gap is a separate, deliberate setting. Account owners and admins control whether viewers of a shared recording link can see the transcript at all, through a "Viewers can see the transcript" toggle under Recording & Transcript settings, documented by Zoom here. It's independent of whether the transcript was generated in the first place — a meeting can have a perfectly good .vtt that only the recording's owner can reach, because the share-link viewer toggle is off.
Practically: if you own the recording, go to your own portal instead of your own share link — you'll see the Audio Transcript file regardless of that viewer setting. If someone else owns it and the link genuinely doesn't show a transcript, the fix is on their end: they check that toggle, or just download the .vtt from their own account and send it to you directly.
For the rest of what typically sits in that same recording folder — the video, the audio-only file, the chat log — this breakdown of every Zoom recording file and which one to send covers it.
.vtt vs .srt — which one do you actually have
Both are plain-text caption formats: a sequence of numbered, timestamped snippets of speech, not sentences and paragraphs you'd read comfortably. WebVTT (.vtt) is the newer format, built for the web — it's what browsers' native video players and Zoom itself use. SRT (.srt), short for SubRip, is the older and simpler of the two, and it's still the format most widely accepted by video-editing software and third-party captioning tools.
Zoom's cloud recording only ever produces the transcript as .vtt — there's no setting or download option in the web portal that exports it as .srt instead. If whatever you're sending the file to specifically requires .srt — an older editing tool, a captioning platform, a learning-management system that only ingests SRT — you'll need to convert it with a .vtt-to-.srt tool, or check first whether that tool actually accepts .vtt directly, since most modern ones do.
How RecordFlow fits
When RecordFlow archives a recording to Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox, the raw .vtt moves directly from Zoom into your own storage the moment the meeting syncs — nothing kept on RecordFlow's side — so there's no separate trip back into Zoom to find it. Because a caption file is rarely what you actually want to read, RecordFlow also uploads a cleaned-up version of the same transcript next to it: a native Google Doc on Drive, or a Word document on OneDrive and Dropbox. If turning a .vtt into something readable is the job in front of you, the walkthrough on converting a Zoom transcript to Word covers that conversion end to end.
Stop hunting for Zoom files after the fact.
Connect Zoom to Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox once, and every recording — video, chat log, and .vtt transcript — lands in your own storage automatically. Free to start.
