Microsoft Teams Transcription — Learn How to Get Started

Remote meetings are great for a number of reasons. Not commuting to the office saves you time. The ability to meet with anyone, anywhere in the world expands your meeting possibilities. Not changing your pajamas (allegedly) is…extremely comfortable.

But the most underrated feature of remote meetings is the ability to record it for later review. This feature can cut down on note-taking and let every team member stay as engaged as possible. But how do you get the most out of your recording, especially when you’re using a platform such as Microsoft Teams?

The best way to get the most out of your recording is to turn it into a transcription. An accurate meeting transcription helps you find all the information you need without scrubbing through the entire thing, making it an incredibly efficient tool to add to video meetings.

Here’s how to get your Microsoft Teams transcription the Teams way, as well as the far superior (in our opinion) Rev way.

1. Step One: Start Your Meeting

This step might seem obvious, but it’s important because you can’t start transcribing unless a Teams meeting is live. Once your meeting is active, it’s easy to begin live transcription that can also be viewed later.

Note that only the meeting organizer can record or transcribe Microsoft Teams meetings. Luckily, it’s easy to share with the rest of the team.

2. Open Your Meeting Controls

Your device will have a “Meeting Controls” panel or toolbar, usually located on the bottom of your screen. Open the menu.

3. Click “More Options”

In your Meeting Controls toolbar, you’ll see three dots with the word “More” underneath. Click those to open an additional menu, where you’ll see “Start Transcription.” Click that to start your Microsoft Teams transcription.

If you want to record your meeting, you can do that within that same subsection of the Teams menu. Though it’s important to note you can get a Teams meeting transcription without recording. But, if you plan to use an outside service like Rev for transcription, you’ll have to record it (or connect our notetaker to your Teams account and let it do the work for you — more on that later).

4. Hide or Show Your Live Teams Transcription

You might want to see your transcription live on screen or you might just want to review the entire document at a later date. To toggle between the two options, click again on those three dots to open the “More Options” menu. Here you’ll find “Hide Transcript” or “Transcript.” Choose your preferred mode.

5. Download Your Transcript

Whether you were viewing your transcript as it happened or not, you’ll always be able to download the full document to review later. To download your Microsoft Teams transcript, keep your Teams app open and select “Chat,” which looks like a comic book dialogue bubble.

Open the meeting chat and click “Download” and choose your file format. You can also choose your download destination here, but the default is usually your “Documents” folder.

Another way to download your Microsoft Teams transcript is to open the meeting event notice in your calendar. The transcript is immediately posted there when the meeting ends.

6. Share Your Teams Meeting Transcript

Your Teams transcript should be available in everyone’s calendar event notice, but you can also share the transcript through the meeting chat feature. In the meeting chat box, click the “Attach” icon and upload the saved document. You can also attach the document to an email the same way.

Skip Teams Transcriptions, Opt For Rev’s Accuracy

A transcript that isn’t accurate isn’t incredibly useful. Knowing who said what, when they said it, and exactly what they said can eliminate a pile of miscommunication and confusion down the road, so why not get your Teams meeting transcribed with 99% accuracy? Rev’s AI transcription with human assistance is the most accurate transcription available, so you can feel secure knowing your information is correct.

And Rev’s new AI Notetaker takes meeting efficiency to the next level. Not only will it integrate with Teams to get the most accurate meeting transcriptions, the Rev AI Notetaker will attend the meeting for you if you can’t be there. It also offers the opportunity to view live transcription as it happens, and provides summaries of the conversation complete with insights about the data. The AI Notetaker comes with a variety of templates; whatever you need your notetake to do, you can just ask it, including:

• Summarize the meeting
• Outline next steps
• Create a content outline

You can also save your template so that it’s there for you next time you use the Rev AI Notetaker.

Transcribing a Teams Recording With Rev

It’s easy to get a Teams meeting transcript with Rev’s industry-leading accuracy. You’ll have to record your meeting first, though, unless you’ve already integrated the Rev AI Notetaker with Teams. It’s coming soon, so stay tuned!

To upload your meeting to Rev and get it instantly transcribed:

1. Go to the Rev AI Transcription page
2. Click “Get Started”
3. Upload Your Microsoft Teams Meeting File. Find the file on your computer and drag it to the ‘Upload Files’ box. Or, click “Upload Files” and navigate to your recording through the dialogue box. You can also paste a URL if your recording is available on a public cloud storage location.
4. Choose your add-ons. You can pick from a number of useful extras, including:
   • Rush My Order expedites your order, delivering up to five times faster
   • Timestamping syncs your text’s timestamps with your audio
   • Verbatim, transcribes everything exactly as it was said, Including filler words (um, ah), nonverbal communication, and false starts
   • Instant First Draft is an AI-generated transcript delivered in minutes while you wait for the final version
5. Checkout
6. View and edit your transcript. When your transcript is ready, we’ll let you know. (Average turnaround times vary by recording length and quality, but the median turnaround time for a 30-minute file is eight hours.) If you’re a subscriber, you can click “View and Edit Transcript” to access the transcript in our editing tool alongside your uploaded video. Here, you can play through your video while checking your transcript. Edit, highlight, strikethrough, or annotate your transcript if you wish.
7. Export your file in Word, PDF, or .txt format.

How Reliable Is Rev Teams Transcription?

Rev is statistically the most reliable transcription service out there, and we have the study to prove it.

We recently partnered with an independent research firm to conduct performance reviews of the 10 most popular transcription services, including Rev and Microsoft. A major portion of the study focused on “Word Error Rate” or WER, which reports the number of errors made per recording segment. The lower the score, the more accurate the service.

The study separated recordings into “environment” categories based on where and how the audio was recorded. WER was measured in five categories: Clean, Far-Field, Telephony, Noisy, and Music. Rev performed well and bested Microsoft in all five categories. Here are the head-to-head results.

• Clean Recording Environments
  • A clean recording environment is quiet, with minimal interference.
    • WER Results:
      • Rev: 17.5
      • Microsoft: 17.9
• Far-Field Recording Environments
  • In far-field recording environments, the speakers were far away from the microphones in potentially echoey situations.
    • WER Results:
      • Rev: 24.0
      • Microsoft: 28.2
• Telephony Recording Environments
  • Telephony recording environments include situations where the audio is compressed or disrupted by static or other interference, like recording over a phone connection.
    • WER Results:
      • Rev: 33.8
      • Microsoft: 34.1
• Noisy Recording Environment
  • Noisy environments include situations with plenty of background disruption or crosstalk. I.E., normal everyday public situations.
    • WER Results
      • Rev: 27.1
      • Microsoft: 30.9
• Music Recording Environment
  • A music environment includes a place where music is playing, like a noisy bar or a coffee shop.
    • WER Results
      • Rev: 21.6
      • Microsoft: 25.9

Benefits of Transcribing Meetings

Getting your Teams meeting transcript is a great boost for both productivity and engagement. Knowing that you’ll have an accurate account of everything said in your meeting means that the days of furious note-taking are over.

This, in turn, means that instead of scribbling in their notebooks, the entire team can have engaged, meaningful conversation. There’s also a comfort in knowing that everything will be preserved for the record, so conversations and meeting minutes won’t be misremembered.

Transcripts are also easily searchable, so you don’t have to re-watch an entire recording to find what you need. If you use Rev’s AI Assistant, you’ll receive summaries of the entire meeting as well as insights about the conversation. Whether you use Teams, Zoom, or any other meeting services, transcription is a win-win tool, in our humble opinion.

Put Rev on Your (Microsoft) Team

Meeting with Microsoft Teams saves everyone involved a whole lot of time, but if you aren’t recording and transcribing your meeting, you and your team aren’t being as efficient and productive as you can be.

Rev can help you create a Microsoft Teams transcription (as well as a Zoom transcription or Google Hangouts transcription for that matter) quickly and accurately. Our AI transcriptions offer a quick turnaround time, but if you want 99% accuracy, we offer a human transcription option that simply can’t be beat.