How to use properly the AI Interpreter agent

Question

Hello MS support,

I’ve been testing the AI Interpreter feature in Microsoft Teams following this guide: Interpreter agent in Teams.

I requested trials for both Copilot and Teams Premium, but I need clarification:

1. Licensing – Is Teams Premium required for the interpreter feature, or is a Copilot license sufficient?

Functionality – In our customer meetings, we often have attendees who only speak Spanish. Our goal is:

When the customer speaks in Spanish, we should hear a real-time English translation.

  When we speak in **English**, the customer should hear a **real-time Spanish translation**.
  

Observed behavior:

• If I set the interpreter language to Spanish: when I speak English, the other side hears me in English (not translated). However, when they speak Spanish, I hear them in English (translated).

Question: Is there a way to configure the interpreter so that both directions (English ↔ Spanish) work as expected? Also, how does this behave if the customer does not have a Copilot or Teams Premium license?

Thank you for your support!

Kind regards,
Mihael

Answer 1

Hello Mihael !

Thank you for posting on Microsoft Learn. This feature is new and the licensing can be confusing.

AI Interpreter (audio to audio translation) is a Microsoft 365 Copilot feature. Each person who wants to hear translated audio must have a Copilot license (plus a normal M365 + Teams license). Teams Premium isn’t required for Interpreter itself. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/interpreter-agent-teams

Live translated captions or multilingual speech recognition can be enabled at the organizer level if the organizer has Teams Premium or Copilot, then all attendees can use translated captions without their own license. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions-in-microsoft-teams-meetings-4be2d304-f675-4b57-8347-cbd000a21260

Interpreter is per participant. If you turn it on and choose Listen in English, you’ll hear Spanish to English. The customer will still hear your original English unless they turn on Interpreter and set Listen in Spanish. That’s why your English wasn’t translated for them.

If you want getting true bidirectional EN/ES, you can do this in the meeting for each side:

• More actions then Language and speech then Interpreter : Turn on for me
• Set Listen to meeting in: your target language (you: English, them: Spanish).
• You can pick Choose your voice when interpreted if you want simulated voice.

If your customer doesn’t have Copilot, they won’t get translated audio.