Transcribing a Teams meeting without Copilot
The most expensive misunderstanding in Microsoft Teams is that a transcript needs Copilot. It does not. Copilot reads the transcript — Teams writes it, and most business licences already include that.
What actually writes the transcript
Three separate things get run together, and untangling them is usually worth more than any purchase.
| Feature | What it does | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| Live captions | Writes what is said on your screen, as it is said, with speaker names. Nothing is kept. | Nothing. Any participant, any meeting, including as a guest. |
| Live transcription | The same text, saved to a file against the meeting afterwards. | A business licence — included in Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise plans — and permission from the organiser's tenant. |
| Copilot | Summarises and answers questions about a transcript that already exists. | A paid add-on, on top of the above. |
So the sentence to hold on to: Copilot does not transcribe anything. If you have no transcript, Copilot has nothing to read, and buying it changes nothing about that.
Teams Premium is a different question again. It buys translated captions, meeting templates and branding. Ordinary transcription in your own language is not what it is for, and people quote for it every week believing otherwise.
First, check whether you already have it
In a meeting, open More (…) → Record and transcribe → Start transcription. If it is there and it is not greyed out, that is the whole job — the transcript lands with the meeting and in the chat when the call ends, at no extra cost.
A great many organisations pay for Copilot without ever discovering that this button was free the entire time.
When the button is greyed out
Hover the lock icon and Teams names the reason. Licensing is the least common of them. In order of how often each actually turns out to be the cause:
- It is not your meeting. Only somebody in the organiser's own tenant can start transcription. If you joined a client's or a supplier's call, no purchase on your side unlocks it — that situation has its own page.
- An administrator has switched it off in the Teams meeting policy, for the tenant or for a group of users. This is a setting, not a licence, and it is free to change.
- The organiser restricted it in Meeting options, under Recording & transcription.
- The licence genuinely does not cover it — worth checking last, because it is rarely the answer.
If you are an administrator, the first thing to try costs nothing: turn transcription on in the meeting policy and test again. If you are not, the question to ask IT is "is transcription enabled in our Teams meeting policy", not "can we buy Copilot".
What you can do with no licence and no admin
Live captions are not restricted the way transcription is. Any participant can turn them on for themselves, in anybody's meeting, on any plan: More (…) → Language and speech → Turn on live captions. Nobody else is notified and no banner appears. Teams writes down what is being said, with each person's name against it, using Microsoft's own recognition.
The only thing wrong with them is that they vanish when the call ends. The full guide to captions covers turning them on, changing the language, and what to do when the option is missing.
Keeping the captions instead
Whispifys is a Chrome extension that reads the live captions already on your screen and keeps them: a timestamped transcript with the real speaker names Teams supplies, searchable months later, on your own account.
- No Copilot licence, no Teams Premium, no admin change. It uses the one feature nobody has to grant you.
- No bot joins the call — nothing in the attendee list, nothing to admit, nothing for a policy to block.
- It works in other people's tenants, which is where Teams' own transcription stops.
- Summaries are included — what was decided and who owns what — without a per-seat AI licence.
Where Teams' own transcription is available to you, use it: it is free, it is built in, and it does not need a browser tab left open. Whispifys is for the meetings where that button is grey.
Telling the room is your responsibility. Captions are not announced, so nobody knows a record is being kept unless you say so. In many places everyone's consent is required before a conversation is recorded in any form. Our terms put that duty on the person doing the recording, because that is where it sits in law.