How to autogenerate a Microsoft Teams transcription for a meeting
Meetings generally do not have transcriptions. They have minutes recorded that are recorded which is a manual task i.e. a participant of the meeting is responsible for writing them.
Transcripts tend to be bar longer, and they cover everything and in some cases, e.g. legal/court proceedings, they’re required. Regardless, if you use Microsoft Teams and need a transcript for your meeting, you can autogenerate one.
Microsoft Teams transcription
Microsoft has a pretty great voice to text service. It uses this service in Microsoft 365 to transcribe audio, and in Microsoft Teams and in Skype to provide live captions during calls. This same tool can generate a transcript for a meeting, provided the meeting has been recorded.
Record meeting
To generate the transcript for a meeting, Microsoft Teams needs it in full and to provide the full meeting, it must be recorded.
- Open Microsoft Teams.
- Go to the Teams tab and select a Team and Channel.
- Start a meeting (or join a meeting).
- Click the more options button at the top and select Start recording.
- When the meeting ends, the recording will end as well.
Note: If you’re unable to start a recording, you may not have permission within the team channel to do so. Ask an admin of the channel to start recording it.
Microsoft Teams transcription for meetings
Once the meeting has ended, and it’s available for download in the channel, you can auto-generate a transcription for it.
- Open Microsoft Teams.
- Go to the team and channel the meeting was held in.
- Click the more options button next to the recording and select ‘Open in Microsoft Streams’.
- A new tab will open in your browser and take you to Microsoft Streams and the recorded meeting.
- Click the more options button under the video and click Update video details.
- Select the language that was spoken in the meeting.
- Enable the Autogenerate captions option.
- Click Apply.
- Wait for the transcription to be generated. This can take time. The longer the meeting, the longer it will take to transcribe it.
Download Microsoft Teams transcription
You can copy and paste the transcription from Microsoft Streams. It is time-stamped so you can easily convert it into a subtitle file however, if you’d like to download all of it in one go, you can do that as well. The file will contain extra information that isn’t relevant outside Microsoft Streams so we’re going to show you how to clean it up.
- Go to Microsoft Streams and go to the recorded meeting.
- Click the more options button under the video and select Update video details.
- Under captions, click the Download file button for autogenerated captions.
- Visit the Microsoft Stream transcript VTT file cleaner tool and upload the VTT file.
- Download the clean version.
Note: the Microsoft Stream transcript VTT file cleaner is NOT affiliated with Microsoft.
Conclusion
Transcriptions can now easily be automated. You may still find that transcription software makes mistakes but correcting them is far easier than manually transcribing a lenghty audio file of any type.
