The feature will be released to users in September

Aug 28, 2020 05:21 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is preparing another important update for Microsoft Teams, the company’s service whose adoption has skyrocketed as the world migrated to working from home.

In September, Microsoft Teams will be updated with live transcription, which means that users will be allowed to create transcripts of a meeting in real-time and review the conversation at a later point.

Furthermore, the text will be attributed to a specific speaker, so it’ll be pretty easy to check out the conversation.

Microsoft explains that live transcription would require a special meeting policy.

“This is a combination of a per-organizer and per-user policy. This setting controls whether captions and transcription features are available during playback of meeting recordings. If you turn this off, the Search and CC options won't be available during playback of a meeting recording. The person who started the recording needs this setting turned on so that the recording also includes transcription,” Microsoft explains.

Only English is supported

Unsurprisingly, the new feature will come with several limitations, and the first of them is the language support.

Only users where English is set as the default language in Microsoft Teams will be able to use the live transcription, and Microsoft explains that English must also be spoken in the meeting for the whole thing to work.

Needless to say, Microsoft is probably working on expanding this functionality to more regions and languages, but for now, English will be the only one to be supported by live transcription.

The adoption of Microsoft Teams has improved at a super-fast pace, and Microsoft itself struggled to keep the service up and running due to more users running it at the same time. The company has even suspended certain functionality to prioritize essential tools, though it goes without saying that paying customers would not be pleased with some features being throttled.