View live transcription in Microsoft Teams meetings

During any Teams meeting, you can start a live transcription of the proceedings. The text appears alongside the meeting video or audio in real time, including the speaker's name (unless they chose to hide it) and a time stamp.

Transcription on right of screen

Overview

Live transcription can make your meeting more productive and inclusive for participants who are deaf or hard-of-hearing or have different levels of language proficiency. Participants in noisy places will also appreciate the visual aid.

People can choose to not be identified in meeting transcripts. For details, see hide your identity in meeting captions and transcripts.

Limitations

Live transcription is available:

On the desktop version of Teams.
For customers with the following licenses: Office 365 E1, Office 365 A1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 A3, Office 365/Microsoft 365 A5, Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 F1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 F3, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium SKUs.

Important: If your organization is using OneDrive for Business and SharePoint for meeting recordings, the IT admin should turn on Allow transcription in the Teams meeting policy and encourage users to start transcription in every meeting. This will make captions available in the post-meeting recording.

Note: If you don't see the transcription options, your IT admin has not enabled this feature for you.

After the meeting, the saved transcript is available for reference and download in Teams on the desktop and web.

Note: People who call in to a meeting using the phone number provided in the meeting details won't be able to view the transcript.

Start live transcription

Go to the meeting controls and select More actions ().
Choose Record and transcribe, and select Start transcription.

Start transcription menus

Tip: If you also want to record the meeting, select More options Microsoft teams More options icon. again and choose Start recording.

All participants see a notification that the meeting is being transcribed. The transcript appears on the right side of your screen.

Change the transcript language

The transcript language must be the same as the language being spoken in the meeting. To change the language setting:

You'll see the live transcription on the right side of your screen. At the top right of the transcript window, select Transcript settings .
Hover over Spoken language. and choose another language everyone in the meeting is speaking.
Select Confirm. The transcript will now display in this language.

Important: When you change the spoken language setting, it affects everyone. The transcript language (as well as that of the captions) will change for all meeting participants.

You have up to 34 different language options for transcription:

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

Hide or show live transcription

Go to the meeting controls and select More actions .
Select Record and transcribe, and choose Hide transcript or Transcript.

Note: Obscenities are obscured by asterisks.

Live translated transcription

Note: Live translated transcription is available as part of Teams Premium, an add-on license that provides additional features to make Teams meetings more personalized, intelligent, and secure. To get access to Teams Premium, contact your IT admin.

Understand each other better during a meeting by translating the meeting transcript into the language you’re most comfortable with.

To translate a transcript during a meeting:

Join a meeting in Teams.
Start live transcription.
In the transcript pane, select Transcript settings.
Hover over Transcript language.
Select the language you want the transcript translated into.

To view the original and translated transcripts side-by-side, turn on the Show both original and translation toggle.

Screenshot of Show original and translated transcription

Notes:

Past translated transcripts aren’t stored. Only the original transcript is stored. If participants join the meeting late, they’ll only be able to view the translated transcript from the point they joined the meeting.
Profanity filtering isn't supported for transcripts.

Stop and restart live transcription

The meeting organizer and presenters can stop and restart transcription during the meeting. (For info about organizer and presenter roles, see Roles in a Teams meeting.)

Go to the meeting controls and select More actions .
Select Record and transcribe and choose Stop transcription or Stop recording (if a recording is in progress).

The transcription stops automatically when all participants leave the meeting.

Download the transcript

When the meeting is over, the transcript is immediately available in the meeting event on the calendar. Meeting participants can download it as a .docx or .vtt file.

Select Chat on the left in Teams.
Open the meeting chat and select the transcript.
Above the transcript, select the down arrow next to Download and then choose the file type you want.

Tip: After the meeting, along with the transcript, any other available meeting-related items (attached docs, meeting notes, the recording) will also be available from the Details tab when you open the meeting event.

Share the transcript with mobile participants

Uploading the transcript to chat makes it available to meeting participants who joined from a mobile device.

Download the transcript to your computer.
In the meeting chat, select Attach beneath the compose box and then upload the transcript.

Delete the transcript

The meeting organizer can delete the transcript.

Open the meeting and go to Recordings & Transcripts.
Select Delete above the transcript to delete the transcript.

Who can start, stop, view, and download a transcript?

Type of meeting participant	Start and stop transcription	View real-time transcription	View transcript after meeting	Download transcript after meeting
Organizer	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Person from same tenant*	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Person from another tenant	No	Yes	No	No
Anonymous	No	No	No	No

* Your tenant is all the people who share common access to Teams, as defined by your IT admin.

Notes:

Teams live transcript is stored in the meeting organizer's Exchange Online account. The transcript can be accessed through the meeting chat and Recording & Transcripts tab in Teams until a meeting organizer deletes the transcript.
The initial release of Meeting Transcription will not have support for applying retention policies, eDiscovery, or legal hold. As a result, the lifecycle of meeting transcripts will depend on manual management by the meeting organizers.
If you are using Cloud Video Interop (CVI) to join Teams meetings, please contact your CVI provider to ensure that your CVI participants get the transcription notification when transcription starts.

Important: Microsoft reserves the right to restrict transcription and translation services, with reasonable notice, in order to limit excessive use and/or fraud, and to maintain service performance. These services include live captions, subtitles, and transcription functionality available across Office 365 products like Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint, Stream, and others.

For IT admins

Allow transcription

During a Teams meeting, you can start a live transcription of the proceedings. The text appears alongside the meeting video or audio in real time, including the speaker's name (unless they chose to hide it) and a time stamp.

Start/stop transcription

During your meeting, tap More actions > Start transcription to start the transcription.
To stop the transcription, tap More actions > Stop transcription. The transcription will automatically save in the meeting chat.

Access the transcript

After your meeting ends, you can view its transcript in your meeting's chat history. Access the transcript by tapping the link in your team's Meeting ended chat message, or by tapping More > Files.

Note: The Teams mobile app currently supports viewing a transcript after a meeting ends. Live transcription is only available on Teams for desktop.