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A worker using Microsoft Teams

Live Teams Transcriptions

Microsoft has launched a live transcription tool for Teams. In other words, it provides a written record of the spoken word during a meeting.

How it works

The tool identifies each speaker and automatically captures in real-time what each speaker says. As a result, the transcript is available during and after meetings. The speech is transcribed by AI-based Automatic Speech Recognition technology.

As a result, the technology uses a meeting’s invitation, participant names and attachments to improve accuracy and recognise jargon for each transcript automatically.

Using live transcription

To use the tool, the admin must turn on the ‘Allow Transcription’ policy which enables the meeting organiser to start a transcription. Participants are notified that the setting is on and can choose to hide it from their meeting view. If attendees do not want to be identified, they can turn off speaker attribution in their profile settings. After that, the transcripts will be available in a column to the side. Microsoft advises that the tool is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate.

Storage

After each meeting, the saved transcript is downloadable in Teams. In addition to being accessible from desktop and web, it is in the Teams calendar meeting event and through the transcript tile in the chat. The files will be stored in the meeting organiser’s Exchange Online account. However, only the organiser or admin can delete it.

Privacy and security

Microsoft says that no-one at Microsoft can see a meeting’s content. The models are automatically deleted after each meeting. Subsequently, Microsoft doesn’t use or store this data for improving its own AI.

Availability

The tool is available for scheduled Microsoft Teams meetings (in U.S. English) to public cloud customers. They should have licenses for Microsoft 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, and Microsoft 365 Business Premium SKUs.

What does this mean for your business?

Finally, the tool’s introduction is another move in the market battle between Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Although Zoom beat Microsoft to announcing a live transcript feature, Microsoft won in terms of delivering the feature. 

Above all, the live transcript tool will help users to either follow meetings more easily, catch up on meeting content, helping multi-tasking and being an extra accessibility feature.

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