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Configure transcription and captions for Teams meetings

  • Article
  • Applies to:
    Microsoft Teams

APPLIES TO: ✔️Meetings ✔️Webinars ✔️Town halls

In Microsoft Teams, there's an option for meeting, webinar, and town hall recordings to have automatic transcription. Transcription allows users to play back meeting recordings with closed captions and review important discussion items in the transcript. Transcription and captions help create inclusive content for viewers of all abilities.

Note

These settings also affects webinars.

Transcription

This setting is a combination of a per-organizer and per-user policy. This setting controls whether captions and transcription features are available during playback of Teams meeting recordings. The person who started the recording needs this setting turned on for these features to work with their recording.

When transcription is turned on, users have a written copy of the spoken text that is captured in near real time. After the meeting, users can find the searchable transcription stored with the meeting recording. And if transcription was turned on for the recording, Stream plays the video with the transcript next to the recording, and shows who is speaking and when as the video plays. If recording is turned on but transcription is turned off, the recording won't have a transcript file stored next to it. Also, when viewing the recording playback in Stream, captions can't be turned on.

This transcription link remains for the lifetime of the file in most cases, but can be broken if the video file is copied within the same OneDrive or SharePoint site. This would result in captions not displaying on the copied video file.

The transcription is stored together with the meeting recordings in OneDrive and SharePoint storage. An additional copy is stored in the meeting organizer's Exchange Online account.

Note

Transcription for recorded meetings is currently only supported for English (US), English (Canada), English (India), English (UK), English (Australia), English (New Zealand), Arabic (United Arab Emirates), Arabic (Saudi Arabia), Chinese (Simplified, China), Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong SAR), Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan), Czech (Czechia), Danish (Denmark), Dutch (Belgium), Dutch (Netherlands), French (Canada), French (France), Finnish (Finland), German (Germany), Greek (Greece), Hebrew (Israel), Hindi (India), Hungarian (Hungary), Italian (Italy), Japanese (Japan), Korean (Korea), Norwegian (Norway), Polish (Poland), Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian (Romania), Russian (Russia), Slovak (Slovakia), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish (Sweden), Thai (Thailand), Turkish (Türkiye), Ukrainian (Ukraine), Vietnamese (Vietnam).

Use the Teams admin center to turn on or turn off transcription

In the Teams admin center, you can turn on or turn off the Transcription setting within a meeting policy located under Meetings > Meeting policies. This setting is off by default.

Use PowerShell to turn on or turn off transcription

Using PowerShell, you can configure the -AllowTranscription setting in TeamsMeetingPolicy. To learn more, see Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy.

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity <policy name> -AllowTranscription $True

For information on how your end users can use transcription, read View live transcription in a Teams meeting.

Live captions

Teams can detect what’s said in a meeting, webinar, or town hall and present real-time captions. And, if you've turned on the new meeting experience, your users' captions include speaker attribution, so you see not only what's being said, but who's saying it and when.

This setting is a per-user policy and applies during a meeting. This setting controls whether the Turn on live captions option is available for the user to turn on or turn off automatically generated live captions in meetings that the user attends. These captions won't be saved alongside the video file.

This screenshot shows the menu initiated by selecting the ellipses icon. The option to Turn on live captions is highlighted.

Setting value Behavior
Off, but organizers and co-organizers can turn them on Live captions aren't automatically turned on for the user during a meeting. The user sees the Turn on live captions option in the overflow (...) menu to turn them on. This value is the default setting.
Off Live captions are disabled for the user during a meeting. The user doesn't have the option to turn them on.

For information on how your end users can turn on live captions, read Use live captions in a teams meeting. For information on how your end users can do this in live events, read Use live captions in a live event.

For information on how your meeting organizers can set up human-generated captions, read Use CART captions in a Microsoft Teams meeting.

Live translated captions

Note

This feature is temporarily available in public preview. After the preview, the meeting organizer must have a Teams Premium license for attendees to use live translated captions.

By default, live captions are displayed in the language that’s spoken during a meeting, webinar, or town hall. Live translated captions allow your users to see captions translated into the language they’re most comfortable with.

To enable Live translated captions, Live captions must be set to Off, but organizers and co-organizers can turn them on in the corresponding meeting policy in the Teams admin center. To turn off Live translated captions, set this to Off.

For information on how your end users can turn on live translated captions, read Use live translated captions in a teams meeting.