This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Do you wish you could take better notes during meetings or classes held on Microsoft Teams? Jeremy Chapman, from the Microsoft 365 team, demonstrates a new way to automate the process.


 


Screen Shot 2021-03-29 at 12.00.07 PM.png


 


Now in Microsoft Teams, keeping detailed notes for your meetings just got easier, with in-context and automated meeting transcripts using the brand-new and AI-driven speech-to-text transcription capability built into Teams.


 


Once started, you can watch meeting transcription happen in real time. When the meeting is over, the transcript with speaker attribution is available to all meeting participants directly in the meeting’s chat. So everyone in the meeting can easily get to it and know what each person said.


 


 


QUICK LINKS:


00:23 — Meeting notes capability in Microsoft Teams


01:00 — Automated meeting transcription demo


02:13 — Finding the meeting transcript after the meeting


02:55 — Comparison with automatic captions in Microsoft Stream


03:21 — Enabling meeting transcription for Teams admins


03:37 — Closing remarks


 


Link References:


Find more shows in our work from home series at https://aka.ms/WFHmechanics


 


Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics?


We are Microsoft’s official video series for IT. You can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft.





Video Transcript:


 


-Do you wish you could take better notes during meetings or classes held on Microsoft Teams? I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a terrible note taker and I’ve been in lots of meetings with people dedicated to taking meeting notes, but something like that isn’t practical for every meeting and it might just not be your favorite thing to do.


 


-So today I want to share another work-from-home tip that could make your note taking life a lot easier. So here I’m in a Teams meeting logged in as Adele, the meeting organizer, with two other people, Megan and Jeremy. Now, taking manual meeting notes in Teams has been around for a while. You just go into Settings, then click Take Notes. And this is a great capability to associate written notes with a meeting that everyone in the meeting can get to later. And, of course, you can type whatever you want to here. But that may have been hard to do if you were the one talking maybe or maybe you just wanted to focus on what was being said and not be distracted by typing, or maybe your keyboard was just kind of loud and you didn’t want to distract or disturb others.


 


-Well, now in Microsoft Teams keeping detailed notes for your meetings just got better, with in-context and automated meeting transcripts using the brand new and AI-driven speech-to-text transcription capability built into Teams. So I’ll go back into the meeting and onto the menu. Then I’ll go ahead and hit Start Transcription, and you’ll see the notice to everyone that transcription has started here.


 


-And I’ll go ahead and point out a few cool things about what you’re seeing. So in my case, I have three meetings running on three different monitors. Now just to show how the speaker attribution works, I’ll mute Adele’s microphone here and enable Megan’s. And now I’m talking in the context of Megan. But now I’m going to go head and mute her microphone and enable mine in the Jeremy instance of the meeting. So now you can see that as each person talks, their name and image is next to what they are saying. So this is pretty important for keeping track of who said what. Now I’ll mute my microphone again, and re-enable Adele’s.


 


-Now I’ll go back into the ellipses and stop the transcription. And you’ll see a notification that it’s stopped and you can restart this also if you want to. And this is great if you don’t want something transcribed, for example. And now I can go ahead and leave the meeting and you’ll see my Notes tab is still open, so I’ll go ahead and click into Chat, and there’s our meeting transcript, and it’s available to everyone who participated in this meeting.


 


-And here I’ll open the transcript, and you’ll see where things evolve even more. Here as I scroll down, you can see the speaker attribution, so you know who said what. And you can download the transcript as a Word document here with .docx or as a Video Text Track or .vtt file, and each of those has speaker attribution noted throughout.


 


-Now, just to be fair, the previous integration with Microsoft Stream and meeting recordings would automatically create a caption file that was searchable in Stream, but to find it, you had to go into your video, click on the ellipses, and then update video details, and then right here in captions, your could hit Download, and again that was something that only the person who hit the record button during the meeting could do by default. But now it’s just part of the Teams meeting chat and anyone who was on that meeting can get to it. So if you don’t quite see the Start Transcription option yet in your meetings, it could be that it hasn’t made it to your tenant, or your Teams admin may need to enable policy for you with Allow Transcription enabled as you can see here in the Admin Center. Now, once it’s enabled, if you’re the meeting organizer, you just need to start the transcription and let the speech-to-text AI do the rest.


 


-That was another work-from-home tip that for me has personally been a game changer as I juggle the huge range of topics that we present on Microsoft Mechanics. To find more tips like this on Microsoft Mechanics, check out https://aka.ms/WFHMechanics. Subscribe to our channel if you haven’t already, and thanks so much for watching.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.