How to Turn On, Find and Download a Microsoft Teams Transcript

A Teams meeting just ended, and someone needs the written record: minutes for people who missed it, an exact quote for a ticket, or the list of decisions. The Microsoft Teams transcript has all of it, as long as transcription was running and you have permission to download it.

Quick answer: to get a Microsoft Teams transcript, start transcription during the meeting from More actions > Transcribe. After the meeting, open the meeting chat, go to Recap > Transcript, and use the dropdown next to Download to save a .docx or .vtt file. Organizers and co-organizers can download by default. When no transcript exists, download the meeting recording and transcribe the file instead.

How to turn on transcription in a Teams meeting

A Teams transcript is the written record Teams saves of a meeting, with speaker names and timestamps, stored next to the recording in the organizer's OneDrive. Teams only creates it while transcription is running, so the first step happens during the call.

On the Teams desktop app:

1. In the meeting controls, select More actions (the three dots).
2. Select Transcribe.
3. Confirm the spoken language, then select Confirm.

Starting a recording also starts transcription automatically. The organizer, co-organizers and presenters can stop and restart it from the same menu, and transcription stops by itself when everyone leaves.

Microsoft's guide to live transcription in Teams meetings also notes that with Teams Premium and Copilot, organizers can decide when scheduling who is allowed to record and transcribe: organizers and co-organizers, organizers, co-organizers and presenters, or no one.

For recurring meetings where the record matters (stand-ups with decisions, client calls, interviews), starting the recording at the top of the call is the simplest habit, because it gives you both the video and the transcript in one step.

Where to find a Teams transcript after the meeting

Once the meeting ends, the transcript shows up in three places:

• The meeting chat: open Chat, select the past meeting, then the Recap tab and Transcript.
• The calendar event: open the meeting in the Teams calendar and go to Recap.
• OneDrive or SharePoint: the file sits next to the recording, in the organizer's OneDrive for scheduled meetings or in the channel's SharePoint site for channel meetings.

The Recap view is the easiest place to read it. Each line shows who spoke and when, and the transcript is searchable, which makes it quick to find the moment a decision was made.

How to download a Teams transcript (.docx or .vtt)

The download takes four clicks on desktop:

1. Open Chat and select the past meeting.
2. Select Recap, then Transcript.
3. Open the dropdown next to Download.
4. Choose .docx for a Word document or .vtt for a subtitle file.

Pick the format by what happens next. A .docx file is the one to share, edit into minutes or paste into a summarizer. A .vtt file keeps the timestamps in a caption format, which is useful for subtitling the recording or loading the text into another tool that reads WebVTT.

To get the file onto a phone, download it on desktop and attach it in the meeting chat, where mobile users can open it.

Who can see and download a Teams transcript

Permissions are the main reason people can read a transcript but can't save it. As of October 2026, Microsoft lists these defaults:

Microsoft's support documentation states that, by default, only the meeting organizer and co-organizers can download a Teams transcript as a .docx or .vtt file. Attendees from the same organization can read it after the meeting, and organizers can open downloads to them in the transcript settings in Stream.

To grant permission to download a transcript in Teams, the organizer configures transcript downloads for attendees in Stream, or adds the person as a co-organizer before the next meeting. Dial-in callers can't view the transcript at all, so send them the downloaded file.

Why the transcript is missing or the option is greyed out

When Transcribe doesn't appear or no transcript was saved, the cause is usually one of these:

• The meeting policy turns it off. Transcription is a per-organizer and per-user setting. Admins control it in the Teams admin center under Meetings > Meeting policies > Transcription, or with the -AllowTranscription parameter in PowerShell. Both the organizer and the person starting the transcript need it on.
• Copilot is set to Off. When an organizer turns off Copilot for a meeting, recording and transcription are turned off too.
• You joined from another organization. Guests from another tenant can watch the live transcript but can't start it or open it afterwards.
• The file expired. Microsoft's recording expiration policy gives meeting recordings and transcripts a default expiration time of 120 days. Expired files move to the recycle bin, where a work or school account keeps them for 93 days unless the admin changed it.

Admins can check a specific account with the Teams transcripts diagnostic in the Microsoft 365 admin center. It takes the user's email and the meeting link and reports what blocks transcription. The full list of transcription and caption policies is on Microsoft Learn's page on managing transcription and captions for Teams meetings.

No transcript? Transcribe the Teams recording instead

Plenty of meetings get recorded without a transcript: the policy was off, Copilot was set to Off, or nobody started transcription. Teams can't create a transcript afterwards, but the recording still holds every word, and a speech-to-text tool can turn the file into text.

1. Get the MP4. The organizer opens the Recordings folder in their OneDrive (or the channel's SharePoint site) and downloads the file. Attendees from the same organization have read access only, so they ask the organizer to send it.
2. Upload it to a transcriber. sipsip.ai's free meeting transcriber accepts MP4, M4A, MP3, WAV and other formats from Teams, Zoom and Google Meet, and returns a full transcript with speaker labels. Signed-in users also get a one-click AI summary of decisions and action items.
3. Shrink long recordings first. An hour-long Teams recording often runs to hundreds of megabytes, while sipsip takes files up to 50 MB free and 100 MB with a free account. Saving only the audio fixes that: the browser-based Video to MP3 converter extracts the soundtrack on your device, and a one-hour meeting at 128 kbps comes to roughly 58 MB.

The arithmetic behind that last step is simple. Video carries most of a recording's size, while a 128 kbps MP3 stores 16 KB of audio per second. Speech recognition only needs the audio, so the transcript from the MP3 matches the one from the video.

For a shorter clip, the MP4 to Text tool takes the video file as it is. Guests get one free try a day across sipsip's free tools, and a free account adds 15 credits, with each credit covering two minutes of audio.

Turn the transcript into minutes

A raw Teams transcript is long. A 45-minute call easily runs to thousands of words, with greetings, crosstalk and repeated points. Two quick passes make it useful:

• Summarize it. Copilot does this inside Teams for licensed users. Without Copilot, paste the .docx text or upload the recording to an AI summarizer and ask for decisions, owners and dates.
• Keep the timestamps. When a summary point matters, the timestamp in the transcript lets anyone jump to that moment in the recording and hear it in context.

The same workflow applies to other platforms; the Zoom transcription guide covers Zoom's built-in transcripts and what to do when cloud recording is off.

Get every Teams meeting in writing

Turn on transcription from More actions > Transcribe, read and download it from Recap > Transcript, and ask the organizer for download access when the button is missing. When a meeting was recorded without a transcript, the recording is enough: upload the Teams recording to sipsip.ai's meeting transcriber and get the full text, plus an AI summary when you sign in.

Lukas Müller

Senior Software Engineer, Berlin

I'm a senior software engineer based in Berlin. I track tech keynotes, developer conferences, and AI research content — mostly through transcripts, so I can keep up without blocking my calendar.