Microsoft Teams transcription
There are four ways to end up with a written record of a Teams call. They differ in who finds out, who owns the result, and whether you need anybody's permission first.
1. Teams' own transcription
Teams can produce a transcript itself: More → Record and transcribe → Start transcription. It is accurate, it costs nothing extra, and the result is stored with the meeting.
Two things stop people using it. It announces itself — everyone in the call sees that transcription has started, which changes how some meetings go. And it is often switched off by an administrator, along with recording, in which case the menu item is simply not there. The transcript also belongs to the tenant rather than to you, so it goes when your access does.
2. A meeting bot
Most note-taking products work by joining your call as a participant. You connect a calendar, and their bot appears in the attendee list under a name like "Notetaker".
It works, and it captures audio directly, which is the most accurate approach available. The costs are social and administrative: an extra participant is visible to everyone, some organisations block unknown applications from joining meetings outright, and connecting a calendar means handing over every meeting title and guest list you have.
3. Record now, transcribe later
Record the meeting — through Teams, or with something capturing your screen — and put the file through a transcription service afterwards.
Fine for the occasional important call. As a habit it collapses: it is manual, the files are large, and you are uploading a recording of other people to a third party, which is a bigger commitment than it looks.
4. Reading the live captions
Teams already writes down everything said in a call, if you switch on live captions — with the speaker's real name attached, because Teams knows who is talking. Those captions are shown on your screen and then thrown away when the call ends.
A browser extension can read them as they appear and keep them. Nothing joins the call, nothing is announced, no audio is captured, and no calendar access is needed — the extension is reading a part of the page you are already looking at.
The trade-off is honest: you get exactly what Teams' captions got. They are good, and they are not perfect on names, acronyms and people talking over one another. And somebody has to remember to turn captions on at the start of the call.
Which to use
| If you want… | Use |
|---|---|
| A record your organisation owns, with everyone informed | Teams' own transcription |
| The highest accuracy, and a bot in the room is fine | A meeting-bot product |
| Your own searchable record, with nothing added to the call | A captions-reading extension |
| Transcription where an admin has disabled it entirely | Ask the admin. None of these is a way round a policy |
What Whispifys does
Whispifys is the fourth kind, for Microsoft Teams and nothing else. It reads the live captions in your browser and keeps them as a transcript with real names and timestamps, searchable across every call you have ever recorded. Calls can be grouped into a space — a project, a customer, a recurring one-to-one — and asked a single question across all of them at once, which is the thing a per-meeting transcript cannot do.
Transcripts, search and spaces are unlimited on the free plan. Credits are spent only on the built-in AI, and you can connect your own AI assistant instead and pay nothing for it at all.
Telling the other people is your job. Captions are not announced, so nobody knows a record is being kept unless you say so, and in many places the law requires that you do. Our terms say the same.