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 taking meeting notes, but something like
that isn’t practical for every meeting and it might 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. I’m in a Teams meeting logged in as
Adele – the meeting organizer – with two other people – Megan and Jeremy.
Taking manual meeting notes in Teams has been around for a while. You just go into settings,
and 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. But that may have been hard to do if
you were the one talking, Maybe you just wanted to focus on
what was being said and not be distracted typing, Or maybe your keyboard was just kind of loud.
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. I’ll go back into the meeting and into the menu,
then hit Start Transcription – and you’ll see the notice to everyone that transcription has started.
And I’ll point out a few cool things about what you’re seeing.
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 and enable Megan’s.
Now I’m talking in the context of Megan. Now I’ll mute her microphone
and enable mine in the Jeremy instance. So you can see that as each person talks,
their name and image is next to what they are saying. This is pretty important
for keeping track of who said what. Now I’ll mute my microphone again, and re-enable Adele’s.
Then I’ll go back into the ellipse and stop the transcription.
You’ll see a notification that it’s stopped and you can restart it also
if you want. This is great is you don’t want something transcribed for example.
Now I can leave the meeting and you’ll see my notes tab is still open, so I’ll click into Chat,
and there is our meeting transcript – and it’s available to everyone in this meeting.
But here as I open the Transcript, 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 also 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 and it was searchable in Stream, but to find it,
you had to go into your video, click on the ellipses,
then “update video details”, then on the right in captions,
hit “download file” – and again this was something
only the person who hit record meeting could do by default.
Now it’s just part of the Teams meeting chat and anyone on that meeting can get to it.
So if you don’t see the Start Transcription option yet, it could be that it hasn’t quite made
it to your tenant, or your Teams admin may need to enable the policy for you
with “Allow Transcription” enabled as you can see here in the Admin Center.
And 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.
So that was another work-from-home tip that for me personally has been a game changer
as I juggle the huge range of topics we present on Microsoft Mechanics.
To find more tips like this on Microsoft Mechanics, check out aka.ms/WFHMechanics,
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