How to add captions to a Microsoft Teams meeting

Method 2: Recording + Transcribe for an after-meeting transcript

Teams' Record button (during a meeting) can include a transcript on most paid plans. The recording and transcript land in the organizer's OneDrive (for non-channel meetings) or the channel's SharePoint (for channel meetings) once the recording finishes processing.

The transcript is searchable, exportable as a docx or vtt, and visible in the Teams chat for the meeting alongside the recording. It's the simplest way to get a usable post-meeting transcript without leaving Microsoft 365.

Method 3: Run a dedicated captioning platform alongside Teams

Teams' built-in captions are excellent for internal meetings. They're not always the right fit for external events: Teams Live Events (large webcasts), town halls broadcast to thousands, and customer-facing webinars often need things Teams doesn't do natively — viewer-side language selection across many languages, custom vocabulary per event, real-time engagement analytics on caption viewers, and a transcript that becomes a public-facing indexable page after the event.

For those cases, a dedicated captioning platform running alongside Teams gives you the right deliverables. The host's machine captures audio (which is going to Teams anyway), the dedicated platform produces a viewer URL, and you share that link with attendees in the Teams chat at the start. Real-time captions appear on attendee devices; the transcript and AI summary land on the platform's dashboard the moment the meeting ends.

EventRecast is built around this pattern. It works alongside Teams without requiring an integration on the Teams side — the captioning runs in parallel, not as a Teams app.

Which method to pick

For internal team meetings, status updates, customer support calls, 1:1s — Teams' built-in captions are enough. Recording + Transcribe handles after-meeting needs.

For Teams Live Events broadcasting to large audiences, customer webinars, multi-region town halls, and any meeting that produces external content — pair Teams with a dedicated captioning platform. The marginal effort is small; the post-event content quality difference is significant.

For events with WCAG 2.2 / ADA compliance requirements where attendees may include deaf or hard-of-hearing participants, accessibility coordinators typically recommend a dedicated platform with documented accuracy targets, alongside ASL interpreters for high-stakes sessions.