At Inspire Cloud, we work with several legal and professional services firms, and they often talk about the need to take minutes and transcriptions within meetings, which are then stored on the relevant client folders following the meeting. Some even employ the services of staff to take all transcriptions in the meetings, so it’s a common need that can come with high cost.
We have also seen clients working with Microsoft Teams try to find a solution by having automatic captions in the meeting, but that was not intended to help with transcribing a meeting, as you could not download them following the completion of your meeting. Therefore, there was no simple answer to provide a meeting experience with automatic transcriptions.
Well, that time has changed as Microsoft have now released new AI capability within Microsoft Teams, which will allow a meeting organiser (or presenter) to enable Microsoft AI to automatically transcribe your Microsoft Teams meeting and then provide a Word document with the transcriptions &/or a VTT file (which is a captions file). Not only that, but the transcriptions are also structured by the participants names automatically too.
SO, HOW DO I TRANSCRIBE MY TEAMS MEETINGS?
Well, it will firstly require your IT Administrator or IT Team to change a policy setting in Microsoft Teams to allow you to transcribe your meeting (I’ll cover that later), but otherwise it will just take a few clicks to transcribe your Teams meeting and I’ll cover that here:
- Firstly, in your Teams Meeting, head over to your three-dot menu
- Simply click on ‘Start transcription’
- A message will appear advising that the meeting is being transcribed
GREAT STUFF, BUT WHERE CAN I FIND THOSE TRANSCRIPTIONS?
Following the end of your Microsoft Teams Meeting, head back into your meeting information via your Calendar and the ‘Recordings & Transcripts’ tab will be shown. Within that you will see your transcriptions, but you can also select ‘Download’ from the top left and download in either a word document and save to your client folder or download as a caption file.
HOW CAN MY IT ADMINISTRATOR OR IT ADMIN ENABLE TRANSCRIPTIONS?
This will require an IT Administrator, as you are required to either update your Teams Global Meeting Policy or create a new Meeting policy, should your IT Administrator want to restrict this to a select few people in your company.
Firstly, before you make any changes just ensure that you review the official documents from Microsoft here to understand more about Teams Policies if you have not changed or updated them previously.
Now with the knowledge of Microsoft Docs, you can head over to your Microsoft Teams Admin Centre and follow the below:
- Open Meetings
- Open Meeting Policies
- Access the relevant policy (for example, Global)
- Under ‘Audio & Video’ turn on ‘Allow Transcription’
- Save your changes and give it a few hours to apply for your end users
FINALLY, WHAT DEVICES, LANGUAGES AND LICENSES ARE SUPPORTED?
Transcriptions are only available to be enabled on Teams Desktop, so you cannot transcribe a meeting if you are using Teams for Web. However, you can access transcriptions captured from a meeting hosted in Teams Desktop, via Teams for the Web.
In relation to languages, only English (U.S) is supported for transcriptions but I am sure we will see this expand to more languages in the future.
Finally, the meeting organiser will require to have one of these licenses allocated to them: Office 365 E1, Office 365 A1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 A3, Office 365/Microsoft 365 A5, Microsoft 365 F1, Office 365/Microsoft 365 F3, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Microsoft 365 Business Premium SKUs
NEED FURTHER HELP WITH TRANSCRIPTIONS?
If you would need any further help in enabling transcriptions for Microsoft Teams, feel free to get in touch with us and we can help you get up and running and show you some other great new features too.
