How to turn on live captions in Microsoft Teams
Three clicks, in any Teams call. Only you see them, nobody in the call is told, and it does not start a recording.
In a call, on the web or in the desktop app
- Join the call, then open More — the … button in the meeting toolbar at the top.
- Choose Language and speech.
- Choose Turn on live captions. Captions appear at the bottom of the call within a second or two, with each speaker's name beside what they said.
To stop them, the same menu now reads Turn off live captions.
Captions are per call, not a setting you leave on. Teams starts every new meeting with them off, so this is something to do at the beginning of each call rather than once. It is the single most common reason people think captions are broken.
On mobile
In the Teams app on iOS or Android, tap More during the call, then Turn on live captions. There is no Language and speech submenu on mobile — the option sits directly in that list.
Changing the language
Under Language and speech → Captions language you can tell Teams which language is being spoken. Getting this right matters more than people expect: captions for a call in German with the language left on English produce something close to nonsense. Some tenants also offer live translated captions, where the spoken language and the caption language differ.
When "Turn on live captions" is not there
Four reasons, in the order they are worth checking.
- Your administrator has switched it off. Captions are controlled by a Teams meeting policy, and an admin can disable them for everyone or for particular groups. If colleagues in other teams have the option and you do not, this is why. Only an administrator can change it.
- The meeting is on an older calling path. A few call types — some PSTN and interoperability calls — do not support live captions at all.
- The language is not supported. Live captions cover a long list of languages, but not every one, and an unsupported language hides the option rather than explaining itself.
- You are looking in the wrong menu. On some versions the item sits directly under More, without the Language and speech step in between.
Do live captions record the meeting?
No. Captions are shown on your own screen and disappear when the call ends. Nobody else is told you switched them on, no banner appears, and no file is produced. That is different from Record and from Transcription, both of which announce themselves to everyone in the call and are kept by your organisation afterwards.
It also means the captions themselves are not saved anywhere. Close the call and they are gone.
Keeping what the captions said
That last point is what Whispifys exists for. It is a Chrome extension that reads the captions Teams is already showing and keeps them as a proper transcript — real speaker names, timestamps, searchable months later. No bot joins the call, nothing is announced, and no audio is recorded: it reads what is already on your own screen.
Whether to tell the room is your decision, and in many places your obligation. Teams does not announce captions, so nobody knows a record is being kept unless you say so. Some jurisdictions require everyone's consent before a conversation is recorded in any form. Our terms put that responsibility on the person doing the recording, because that is where it sits in law.