M365 Changelog: Live Transcription

MC260564 – Updated July 02, 2021: Microsoft has updated the rollout timeline below. Thank you for your patience.

This feature update of Live transcription with speaker attribution in Microsoft Teams meetings is a written record of the conversations available during and after the meeting and will provide another way to both follow and review meeting conversations. This feature release will roll out on Teams desktop.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 82029.

When this will happen:

Microsoft will begin rolling this out in late June and expect to complete rollout in early July.

Note: Live transcription generation when a user starts recording a meeting on desktop client will be available in August.

How this will affect your organization

This update improves the accessibility of Microsoft Teams and allows meeting participants to be more productive. It also creates a more inclusive experience for participants who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, or have varying levels of language proficiency. Participants in noisy places will also benefit from the visual aid.

Live transcriptions will be available in English (US) on Teams Desktop for scheduled meetings under the below licenses:

• 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 SKUs

Live transcription is already available under the below licenses:

• Enterprise E3/E5
• Business Standard
• Business Premium customers

What you need to do to prepare

Once admins have enabled this feature, Live transcription will be generated whenever a user starts recording a meeting on desktop client.

• Currently, Live Transcription needs to be started separately from the recording.

Enabling live transcription is required to ensure that closed captions are available during the playback of a Teams meeting recording stored on OneDrive and SharePoint.

Steps to get started:

• The tenant admin needs to turn on the Allow Transcription policy, then
• Meeting organizer or a presenter can start transcription
• Live transcription with speaker attribution is available in new meeting and calling experiences.