How to transcribe a Microsoft Teams meeting recording (2026 guide)

Fastest option: download your Teams recording (.mp4) and upload it to the free video-to-text converter. It works for Teams, Zoom and Google Meet recordings, and your first file needs no sign-up.

Microsoft Teams records meetings as .mp4 files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive. Getting a proper text transcript from that file depends on your Microsoft 365 plan and what you actually need — a verbatim record, a summary, or subtitles. Here is every method available in 2026.

How do I transcribe a 2-hour Teams meeting recording?

Download the .mp4 from the meeting chat, OneDrive or SharePoint and upload it (up to 2 GB). The first 30 minutes are free, and your first file needs no account. Transcribing all 2 hours costs $5 once, with a 7-day Week Pass that never renews. In October 2026, a 145-minute recording took 2 min 45 s once uploaded. TranscribTxt doesn't label speakers.

Option 1: Teams built-in live transcription (Microsoft 365 plans)

Teams can transcribe a meeting in real time while it is happening. The feature comes with business Microsoft 365 plans such as Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium and the Enterprise (E) plans. It is not available on the free Teams tier. Licensing changes from time to time, so check with your admin if the option is missing.

Start transcription during a meeting:

1. In an active Teams meeting, click the three dots (...) in the meeting controls.
2. Select Start transcription.
3. The transcript appears as a side panel and is visible to all participants.

Access the transcript after the meeting:

1. Open the meeting chat in Teams.
2. Open the Recap tab (older versions call it Recordings & Transcripts).
3. Download the transcript as .vtt (subtitles) or .docx (Word document).

The .docx version includes speaker names and timestamps. The .vtt version is ready to attach to the video file as subtitles.

Limitations: Transcription must be started manually unless your admin has set a meeting policy to start it automatically. Accuracy drops with accents and background noise. As of October 2026, Microsoft's support page lists dozens of spoken languages; whoever starts transcription confirms the language being spoken.

Option 2: Microsoft Copilot meeting summary (paid add-on)

If your organization has Microsoft 365 Copilot or Teams Premium, Teams can generate an AI recap after each meeting: key points, action items, and chapter markers in the recording.

This is not a verbatim transcript. It is a structured summary with speaker attribution. Useful for leadership and project tracking, not for compliance or detailed reference.

Where to find it: After the meeting, open the meeting event in your Teams calendar → Recap tab. The summary, chapters, and action items are listed there.

Option 3: Upload the recording to TranscribTxt (no Microsoft plan required)

This is the most flexible option. It works with the free Teams tier, personal Microsoft accounts, and cases where your IT admin has disabled the built-in transcription feature.

Step by step:

1. Open the Teams meeting chat and click the three dots on the recording thumbnail → Download. Alternatively, find the file in SharePoint → channel Files → Recordings.
2. The file downloads as an .mp4.
3. Upload the file above, or on TranscribTxt's transcribe video to text page. The language is detected automatically.
4. Download the transcript as TXT or SRT.

Processing time: In October 2026, half of the files on our servers were transcribed in 14 seconds or less, and a 145-minute recording took 2 minutes 45 seconds. Times don't include uploading, which depends on your connection.

What's free: your first recording needs no account, and a free account covers 3 recordings a day, up to 30 minutes and 2 GB each. A longer meeting gets its first 30 minutes free. For the full recording, a one-time $5 Week Pass gives you 7 days of Pro (up to 25 hours of audio), or Pro is $10/month, with files up to 2 GB on both.

Language support: 99 languages, detected automatically, so there's nothing to set.

TranscribTxt runs on OpenAI's Whisper large-v3 turbo. It doesn't label speakers, so if you need names next to each line, use Teams' own transcript where it exists. The recording is deleted after processing (a free-preview upload is kept up to 24 hours so you can finish it), and the transcript isn't stored on our servers, so download it before you leave.

Option 4: Whisper (local, unlimited, private)

For highly sensitive meetings — legal proceedings, HR investigations, client calls under NDA — running Whisper locally means the audio never leaves your machine.

# Install
pip install openai-whisper

# Transcribe the downloaded Teams recording
whisper "teams-meeting.mp4" --language en --model medium --output_dir ./transcripts

Whisper outputs .txt, .srt, and .vtt files. It is free but slow without a GPU, so budget time for long recordings. Use large-v3 for technical content or non-English audio.

For speaker diarization (labeling who said what), combine Whisper with pyannote-audio — both run locally with no data leaving the device.

Comparing the options

Microsoft's plans and language lists are as published in October 2026; check Microsoft's documentation for the current details.

How to find a Teams recording if you can't locate it

Teams recordings go to different places depending on how the meeting was set up:

• Channel meeting → SharePoint → the channel's document library → Recordings folder
• Private (non-channel) meeting → OneDrive of the meeting organizer → Recordings folder
• Meeting chat → click the recording thumbnail → three dots → Open in SharePoint

If the recording is missing, check whether it expired. Teams recordings can be deleted automatically after a period your admin sets.

Getting more from your Teams transcript

• Search across meetings. Store transcripts in a shared SharePoint folder or Notion database. When someone asks "what did we decide about the Q3 budget?", search the text instead of rewatching recordings.
• Auto-generate meeting notes. Paste the transcript into Claude with: "Summarize this meeting and list action items with owners." Add the attendee list if your transcript has no speaker names.
• Create subtitles for internal training. Export as .srt from TranscribTxt and use VLC or any video editor to burn in subtitles before sharing the recording with new team members.
• Compliance archiving. Teams transcripts saved as .docx with speaker names and timestamps are acceptable documentation for many regulated industries.

Transcribing calls on another platform? See the same approach for Zoom recordings and Google Meet recordings, or the wider best AI meeting transcription software comparison.