How to Enable Transcription in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is one of the most popular meeting and collaboration tools on the market, making it a go-to for many businesses. It’s frequently gaining new features to help teams work together, including the ability to enable transcription in meetings in real time.

• Read Microsoft Teams news here

Automatic meeting transcriptions help with note-taking and allow users to search for specific questions or topics more quickly. So that just leaves one question: how do you enable transcriptions in Microsoft Teams?

We’ve created this step-by-step guide to help you get started.

3-Step Instructions for Enabling Transcription

You can enable transcriptions from your Microsoft Teams Admin Center or the PowerShell command centre. To enable transcriptions from the Admin Center, just follow these three steps:

1. Go to the admin account of your Microsoft Teams subscription
2. Go to Meetings → Meeting policies, then scroll down to Audio & video
3. Toggle on “Allow transcription”

And that’s it—you now have transcriptions turned on for your team. From there, you can also customize your settings, such as:

• Enabling cloud recording
• Selecting a transcription storage destination (an average one-hour meeting takes up around 400MB between the recording and transcript, so make sure you have enough storage space)
• Allowing transcriptions on a per-organizer or per-user basis

Depending on your needs, you can enable transcriptions on a per-organizer or per-user basis.

In addition, when enabling transcriptions, you can also enable real-time captions. This displays the transcript as recorded during the call, adding captions to the conversation as participants speak.

Note that transcriptions and closed captions are currently available in the language you have set in your spoken language setting. Transcripts and live captions will not translate into different languages during the call.

Enable Transcription with PowerShell

You can also set up transcriptions using PowerShell commands. Simply go to the TeamsMeetingPolicy environment and change the setting to AllowTranscription. From there, you can give all your users transcriptions as part of the Global policy change.

If users have their own assigned policy, they won’t be a part of the Global policy. Admins can adjust this by using a cmdlet to remove policy assignments.

PowerShell also lets you set how many users can transcribe meetings, whether it’s all of them, most of them, or a select few.

You can also find instructions for configuring PowerShell options in the Microsoft documentation for Teams admins.

Starting/Stopping Transcription During a Call

If your transcriptions aren’t set to start automatically, they can still be launched during a meeting. This is an even more straightforward process:

1. Go to the meeting controls and select More actions
2. Click on Start transcription

Stopping the transcriptions is done through the exact same steps, and transcriptions will also automatically end when all participants leave the meeting.

Accessing Your Transcripts

Once a meeting is over, the transcript and recording are saved to your selected destination. The files are all classified as tenant-only content, which means admins will have access to them even if the person who initially hosted the meeting leaves the company.

Meeting participants can access the transcripts in the meeting event Microsoft Teams calendar, which are saved as .docx or .vtt files. Participants can download the transcript in three simple steps:

1. Go to the Calendar in Teams
2. Open the meeting event and go to Recordings & Transcripts
3. Click the Download button on the top of the page and choose the file type as which to save it

Enabling and saving transcripts on Microsoft Teams is a simple task, and transcripts make it easy to access notes and search records from your meetings. Now that you know how it’s done try turning your transcripts on for your next meeting.

Why Use Transcripts?

You might be wondering why transcripts are such a big deal. Surely you won’t need to save every word from every meeting, right? Well, there are several reasons why having transcripts is beneficial for businesses:

1. In case you missed it: Sometimes, people have to miss a meeting, or at least a moment of it. Maybe they get sick, or get pulled away for a higher priority meeting, or even have to step out for a minute and end up missing something important. In cases like these, having transcripts ready as soon as the meeting is over helps make sure everyone has a record of the entire conversation, and no one misses an important detail
2. Accessibility: Not everyone hears the same. Millions of people in the US alone have hearing loss ranging from mild to profound, so a little help can go a long way. Transcripts and real-time captions assist there by providing a written element to support the conversation, helping attendees catch what’s being said during or after the meeting
3. Compliance and record keeping: Keeping records of meetings and conversations can be particularly important for industries like legal or financial services. In these cases, having transcripts for calls and meetings means you have a complete record of everything that was said, which is useful for both compliance and personal records. You can go back through the transcript and see who said what, so you’ll have records for things like agreements, quoted prices, and account details. Legal and HR departments will also appreciate having the transcripts on file, should any disputes arise
4. Training: Transcripts are also helpful outside of meeting notes, as they can be used for teaching new employees. For customer support environments, for instance, transcripts can provide written examples of great customer interactions employees can reference while training. Even outside of customer environments, transcripts can give employees who weren’t in the meetings a look behind the curtain, so they’ll know what topics are discussed in meetings with clients or managers
5. Customer support: Transcripts are also helpful for customer service teams for more than just training. Keeping transcripts of customer support calls on file makes it easier to keep clear records of issues (and resolutions), review conversations, and provide better customer support. Transcripts can also be saved to call logs in a CRM, and are easy to quickly skim or search to find information from previous calls

Enabling and saving transcripts on Microsoft Teams is a simple task, and transcripts make it easy to access notes and search records from your meetings. Now that you know how it’s done, try turning your transcripts on for your next meeting.