In our increasingly remote and globalised work environment, ensuring that everyone in a meeting can follow the conversation is critical. Whether you are dealing with a poor audio connection, heavy accents, or participants who are deaf or hard of hearing, relying solely on audio can lead to miscommunication and lost productivity.
To solve this, Microsoft Teams includes a powerful, AI-driven Live Captions feature. When enabled, this tool listens to the speaker and automatically generates real-time subtitles at the bottom of the video window, identifying exactly who is speaking and what they are saying.
Enabling Live Captions During a Meeting
Live Captions must be enabled manually by each participant who wants to see them. Turning them on does not force subtitles onto anyone else’s screen; the setting is entirely local to your own view.
- Join your Microsoft Teams meeting as you normally would.
- Once you are in the meeting window, move your mouse to bring up the meeting control toolbar (usually located at the top of the screen in newer versions of Teams).
- Click the More button (represented by three horizontal dots).
- Scroll down the menu and hover over Language and speech.
- Click on Turn on live captions.
Within a few seconds, a black bar will appear at the bottom of your meeting window. As people begin to speak, you will see their name appear alongside a live transcription of their words.
Changing the Spoken Language
By default, Teams assumes the meeting is taking place in English. If the presenter is speaking a different language, the AI will try to interpret the foreign words as English, resulting in a confusing mess of gibberish. You must manually tell Teams which language is currently being spoken.
- With Live Captions already enabled, look at the black caption bar at the bottom of the screen.
- On the far right side of the caption bar, click the small Settings icon (the gear wheel).
- Select Change spoken language from the popup menu.
- A list of supported languages will appear. Scroll through and select the language the presenter is actually speaking (for example, Spanish, French, or Japanese).
- Click Confirm.
Teams will immediately adjust its AI recognition model and begin displaying accurate subtitles for the newly selected language.
Privacy and Data Retention
It is important to note that Live Captions are ephemeral. They appear on the screen to aid immediate comprehension, but they are not saved or recorded by Microsoft Teams once the meeting ends. If you need a permanent, searchable record of everything said during the meeting, you must use the separate “Start Transcription” feature, which generates a downloadable text file that is saved alongside the meeting recording.