Transcription for Super Users

Following on from the post for end users on transcriptions in Teams meetings, here is the extra you need to know as a Super User.

Privacy Concerns

Both close captions and transcripts can display the name of the speaker, though there is a setting to control this for privacy purposes if required.  This is a per user setting and is found in the Teams settings on both desktop and web apps and travels with the user wherever they sign into Teams.

As with meeting recordings agreement from attendees should always be sought.  Often, I will advise participants who do not want to be recorded or transcribed to use the meeting chat and keep their cameras off.  Those messages can be read/summarised for the recording/transcription if needed.

When Can I Use Transcription?

Transcription is disabled by default and so organisations need to enable it.  This setting is a policy setting and as such can be set on/off for different users or groups of users.

The availability of transcripts in a meeting depends on the meeting policy settings assigned to the user who set up the meeting.  The transcription can be started by any user in the same tenant as the meeting organiser, if they too have transcription features enabled in the meeting policy they are assigned.  Once started any meeting attendee can view the meeting if they too have transcription features enabled in the meeting policy they are assigned, including external users.

Prior to the release of the meeting Transcript in March 2021, the transcription setting only controlled whether meeting recordings would have live captions available on them, now this controls the transcript feature as well.

Transcription features are not available in Meet Now meetings at the time of writing, but it is a new feature so this may follow.

Transcription is a meeting only feature and not available for calls.

If your organisation uses a compliance call recording third party tool, then that tool may have different functionality.  This article relates only to the standard Teams Meeting transcription features.

Downloading and Reviewing the Transcript

If you’ve used the transcript generated in classic Stream from meeting recordings, the actual transcript file will look very similar regardless of whether you download it in vtt or Word format.

If you view the transcript via the Recording & Transcript tab in the meeting entry via the Teams calendar after the meeting you see the transcript in the same format as during the meeting, with user pictures and timestamps showing as time of day not meeting duration time.

If there is more than one transcript, e.g. if the transcription is stopped and restarted during the meeting, then you will see multiple transcripts.