How do I keep up in meetings with auditory processing disorder?

Auditory processing disorder causes two different problems in meetings, and one tool doesn’t fix both. One problem is the words: you heard sound but not what it said. The other is the thread: you’re still working out the last sentence while the conversation moves on, and a few sentences later you’ve lost track of what’s being discussed. Live captions fix the first problem. A live summary fixes the second. Changing how the meeting runs makes both easier.

This page is about the practical side. It isn’t medical advice. If you haven’t been assessed and suspect APD, an audiologist is the right starting point, since hearing loss and attention difficulties can look similar and have different fixes.

Why video calls are hard with APD

APD affects how the brain handles sound, not how well the ears pick it up. People with it often pass a standard hearing test and still struggle with speech, especially in the conditions video calls are full of:

• Compressed, patchy audio. Call audio drops detail and sometimes breaks up, which removes cues you’d otherwise lean on.
• People talking over each other. Separating one voice from several is one of the hardest listening tasks, and remote calls make crosstalk worse because of lag.
• Fast, unstructured talk. Meetings jump between topics without warning, so a slow start on one sentence can cost you the next three.
• No lip-reading. Cameras are off, small or out of sync.

The result is that keeping up takes steady effort, and that effort adds up over a day of calls. (If that sounds familiar, the tiredness has a name: Zoom fatigue.)

Captions, transcripts and summaries do different jobs

	Live captions	Live transcript tool	Live summary (Canary)	After-the-meeting notes
What you see	The last line or two of speech	Everything said so far, scrollable	What’s being discussed now, over the last few minutes, and across the whole call	A recap once the call ends
Helps with a missed word	Yes	Yes	No, it summarizes rather than quoting	Too late
Helps you find your place again	No, lines scroll away	Only if you have time to scroll back and read	Yes, one glance	Too late
Works during the call	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Needs a bot in the call	No, built into the platform	Often (bot) or a browser extension	No, it captures your system audio	Often
Works in any meeting app	Only where the platform supports it	Depends on the tool	Yes, anything your computer plays	Depends on the tool

The distinction between the middle two columns is covered in more depth in live transcript vs live summary.

Step 1: turn on captions for the words

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Webex all offer built-in live captions, and at the time of writing macOS and Windows 11 also offer system-wide live captions that work in any app. Availability depends on your plan, language and settings, and your organization’s admin may need to enable it, so check the current documentation for your platform. See how Teams’ own feature compares in Canary vs Teams live transcription.

For high-stakes meetings, or if you’re deaf or hard of hearing, a human captioner (often called CART) is still the gold standard. People add context and fix errors that automatic captions miss.

Step 2: run a live summary for the thread

Captions show you the words, but they don’t tell you what the discussion is about. When you’re a few sentences behind, which is the usual APD experience, you need something that has already condensed the conversation for you.

That’s what Canary is for. Canary is a real-time, bot-free meeting summarizer. It captures your computer’s system audio (no bot in the call, no plugin) and shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary — from what’s being said right now to the whole call — so you can catch up the instant your name is called.

In practice:

• Glance at “now” when you lose a sentence and want the gist, without asking anyone to repeat it.
• Switch to the last 2 or 5 minutes when you realise the topic changed and you missed the moment it did. This is the multi-resolution summary idea: different time spans for different ways of getting lost.
• Look at “full call” before you speak, to check your answer fits what’s been decided.

Because it listens to your system audio, it works with headphones, in any meeting app, and whoever is hosting. After the call you can review the full transcript, search it, and copy it, which is useful for checking something you’re unsure you heard right.

Be realistic about its limits. Canary uses the same kind of speech recognition as captions, so the conditions that make listening hard for you (crosstalk, bad microphones, heavy background noise) also cause more recognition errors (word error rate explains how that’s measured). A summary also paraphrases. When exact wording matters, such as a number, a name or a commitment, check the captions or ask.

Step 3: reduce the load in the meeting itself

Tools help most when the meeting isn’t working against you. These requests are reasonable to make, and none of them needs a diagnosis to justify:

• Wear headphones. They cut room noise and make voices clearer.
• Ask for an agenda or pre-read. Knowing the topics in advance makes each sentence easier to predict and process.
• Ask for one speaker at a time. Good facilitation helps everyone, not just you.
• Ask for cameras on for key discussions if lip-reading helps you.
• Ask for decisions and actions in writing in the chat or a follow-up message.
• Take breaks between calls where your calendar allows, since listening effort builds up.

If this is affecting your work, ask your manager or HR about workplace accommodations. What’s available depends on your employer and where you are.

Be open about it

If you run a notetaker, tell people. It’s the right thing to do, recording and consent rules vary by region, and an accessibility reason is one most colleagues understand straight away. How to tell participants you’re using an AI notetaker has wording you can use.

If attention is part of the picture too, the best meeting notes app for ADHD covers the same tools from that angle, and why do I zone out in meetings looks at the causes.