How to get a transcript of a Microsoft Teams meeting, including as a guest

Microsoft Teams can transcribe a meeting itself, but the transcript belongs to the meeting's organiser: it is started by someone in their organisation, stored in their OneDrive, and readable afterwards only by people they allow. This guide is for anyone who needs a transcript of a Teams meeting, and particularly for freelancers and consultants who join clients' Teams calls from outside and find the Recap tab empty. The details come from Microsoft's help as of October 2026. The Google Meet version is how to transcribe a Google Meet call.

Can Microsoft Teams transcribe a meeting by itself?

Yes, with live transcription, in organisations whose policy allows it. Microsoft's admin page on transcription says transcription "is both a per-organizer and per-user policy setting": the organiser must have it turned on, and so must the person who starts it. The policy is on by default for new policies, and an administrator can turn it off.

So the first question is about the organiser, not you. If the organiser's organisation allows it, the meeting can be transcribed; whether you, the guest, can start it is a separate question.

How do you start transcription in a Teams meeting?

From More actions in the meeting controls. Microsoft's page on live transcripts in Teams meetings gives the steps:

1. Select More actions in your meeting controls.
2. Select Transcribe.
3. Confirm the language everyone is speaking in the meeting.
4. Select Confirm.

Everyone in the meeting is notified that it is being transcribed. The organiser, co-organisers and presenters can stop and restart it. The language you confirm matters: Teams transcribes in it, and speech in another language comes out as the wrong words until the language is changed. Microsoft says Teams detects the mismatch and prompts the organiser, a co-organiser or whoever started the transcript to update the spoken language. Why captions pick one language explains the effect.

Who can start, read and download a Teams transcript?

It depends on who you are in relation to the organiser. Microsoft's page sets it out in a table, reproduced here:

Participant	Start and stop	Read it live	View after the meeting	Download after the meeting
Organiser	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Person from the same organisation	Yes	Yes	Yes	No, but organisers can configure who can download
Person from another organisation	No	Yes	No	No
Anonymous	No	No	No	No

Microsoft adds that people who dial in by phone cannot view the transcript. The table has no row for guests with an account in the organiser's organisation, so if that is you, ask rather than assume. Organisers can also be allowed by their administrator to stop participants copying or forwarding transcripts.

Where does Teams save the transcript?

In the organiser's OneDrive for work or school. Microsoft's page says transcripts are "stored in the meeting organizer's OneDrive for Business" until the organiser deletes them, and its admin page on recording storage explains that transcripts are stored with the recordings: in the organiser's OneDrive for ordinary meetings, and in the team's SharePoint site for channel meetings.

To find it inside Teams after the meeting:

1. Select Chat.
2. Open the past meeting's chat.
3. Select Recap, then Transcript.

By default, organisers and co-organisers can download it as a .docx or .vtt file; how to download a Teams transcript has the steps. An administrator can set transcripts to expire.

Why is there no transcript for my Teams meeting?

Check, in order:

What you see	Likely cause	What to do
No Transcribe option	You joined from another organisation or anonymously, or policy does not allow it	Ask the organiser to start it
Nobody started it	Transcription is not automatic; someone has to turn it on	Agree before the meeting who will
You read it live, now it is gone	You are from another organisation: live only	Ask the organiser for the file
You saw nothing at all	You joined without signing in, as an anonymous participant, or by phone	Join signed in next time, and ask for the file
Recap shows it but Download is missing	Only organisers and co-organisers download by default	Ask the organiser to download and send it
The words are wrong throughout	The confirmed spoken language did not match the meeting	Set the right language at the start

Joining signed in is worth the effort. As a person from another organisation you can at least read along; as an anonymous participant you see nothing. If a client issued you a member account in their organisation, joining with it puts you in the same-organisation row. The client-issued Microsoft 365 account guide covers when that applies.

What about live captions and the AI recap?

Neither gives a guest a record. Microsoft's live captions page says plainly that "Teams doesn't save captions", and that caption data is permanently deleted after the meeting. Captions help you follow the call; they leave nothing behind.

The AI recap some Microsoft 365 plans offer needs an add-on licence. Microsoft's recap page says that anyone who wasn't invited, or isn't in the organiser's organisation, won't have access to the AI-generated recap, though the organiser can email AI summaries to invited participants, including people outside. As a guest, you get what the organiser sends.

How do you get a Teams transcript when you are a guest?

Ask the organiser to start transcription and send you the file, or bring a notetaker with their agreement. Step by step:

1. Ask before the call. "Could you turn on transcription when we start and send me the transcript afterwards? I'd like to write up minutes." An organiser who hears it beforehand can do it; one who hears it afterwards cannot.
2. Join signed in to a work account, so you can at least read along live.
3. Ask for the .docx afterwards. By default only organisers and co-organisers can download, so it has to come from them.
4. Bring your own notetaker openly. A notetaker bot joins as a guest and waits in the lobby to be admitted, and Teams may flag it as a bot; see a notetaker stuck in the lobby. Tell the client first.
5. Keep your own notes anyway. The transcript is the client's file, held on their terms. Why that matters is argued in when the client hosts, who keeps the notes.

How does TrackHeros transcribe a Teams meeting?

As a participant, so it does not depend on the client's transcription policy, licences or host rights. The TrackHeros notetaker joins from the Teams link about two minutes before the start, under a name you set per client, and waits in the lobby until someone admits it. Teams' bot detection may hold it there and ask the organiser to confirm, which is the organiser's call to make.

Once in, it records the call and collects the captions for the speakers' real names; after the call, an audio pass over the recording produces the authoritative transcript. TrackHeros works out each meeting's language from the meeting itself, from close to 100 spoken languages, and writes the transcript in English, so a call held in French or Arabic is rendered into English line by line. A line it cannot attribute reads "Unknown". The transcript, recording and notes are filed under the client in your TrackHeros workspace rather than in the organiser's OneDrive. How language detection behaves on Teams is in language detection on Microsoft Teams, and the rest is on the Microsoft Teams notetaker page.