How to Transcribe a Microsoft Teams Meeting to Text

Your team just spent an hour on a Microsoft Teams call. Decisions were made, owners were assigned, a few numbers were thrown around. Then the meeting ends and all of that lives inside a recording nobody will rewatch. This guide shows the fastest way to turn a recorded Teams meeting into a clean, timestamped text transcript, then into proper meeting minutes with an AI summary on top. No Teams Premium licence required, works in 90+ languages, and on the right plan it even labels who said what.

Why You Want a Teams Transcript

Meetings are where decisions actually happen, but the output is almost always a recording that sits unwatched in a folder. A text transcript changes that. You can search every line with Ctrl+F to find the exact moment someone committed to a deadline. You can copy a quote into an email instead of paraphrasing from memory. You can generate clean meeting minutes in seconds and send them to the people who could not attend.

It also protects you. When two people remember a decision differently, the transcript is the record. For interviews, client calls, sales discovery, sprint reviews and all-hands sessions, a searchable written version is worth far more than a video nobody opens twice.

Step Zero: Record the Meeting (and Ask First)

This is the part people forget. A Teams meeting has no public video link you can paste anywhere. The only way to transcribe it later is to have a recording file, which means someone has to click Record during the call. If nobody records it, there is nothing to work with afterward.

So before the meeting matters: open the More actions menu (the three dots) in the Teams call controls and choose Record and transcribe, then Start recording. Teams will capture the whole session as an MP4.

One rule before you hit record: tell everyone first. Teams shows a recording banner, but you should still say it out loud and follow your local consent laws and company policy. Recording people without their agreement can be illegal in some regions. A quick "I am going to record this so we have notes, everyone okay with that?" at the top of the call covers you and is just good manners.

Where Teams Saves the Recording

When the meeting ends, Teams saves the recording automatically. Where it lands depends on the type of meeting:

• Standard meeting: the MP4 is saved to the OneDrive of the person who started the recording, usually in a "Recordings" folder.
• Channel meeting: the MP4 goes to that channel's SharePoint document library, so the whole team can reach it.
• Either way: a link to the recording also drops into the meeting chat, which is normally the quickest place to grab it.

Open the recording from whichever location is easiest, then download the MP4 file to your computer. That downloaded file is what you will hand to Dokitscript.

How to Transcribe the Recording Step by Step

Handling Long Meetings and File Size

Most internal meetings run between 15 and 60 minutes. Workshops, training sessions and all-hands calls go longer. Here is how to match the recording to a plan:

Under 35 minutes

A standup, a quick sync or a short client call fits the Pro plan ($14.99/month), which covers clips up to 35 minutes and gives unlimited monthly transcriptions, handy if you process several meetings a week. Shorter still and Starter ($4.99/month) or even the Free plan (3 minutes) may be enough.

35 minutes to 5 hours

This is the sweet spot for real meetings. The Business plan ($79.99/month) handles clips up to 5 hours and unlocks speaker detection, so a long multi-participant workshop, board call or training session gets transcribed in one pass with each person labeled. For most teams running long meetings with several voices, this is the plan that makes the transcript genuinely useful.

Over 5 hours or huge files

For a marathon session, extract the audio to MP3 to shrink the file, then split it into segments with any audio editor and transcribe each chunk, combining the text at the end. It sounds fiddly, but for a day-long workshop it still beats the many hours of typing it would otherwise take. The MP3 step alone removes most of the file-size pain.

Who Said What: Speaker Detection

The whole point of meeting notes is knowing who owns what. On the Business plan, speaker detection labels each voice automatically:

You can rename "Speaker 1" to the real person once and the label applies everywhere they speak. That turns a flat wall of text into a clear record of who committed to which action item, which is exactly what good meeting minutes need. Free, Starter and Pro return a single-speaker transcript without these labels, so for multi-participant meetings the Business plan is the natural fit.

Dokitscript vs the Built-In Teams Transcript

Teams does have its own transcription, so why upload the recording somewhere else? A few honest reasons:

If your meeting was recorded and you can reach the MP4, Dokitscript works regardless of your Microsoft licence tier. The same approach applies to other platforms too, so if your calls happen elsewhere, here is how to transcribe a Zoom or Google Meet recording with the identical upload flow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related: Microsoft Teams transcription · Transcribe a Zoom or Google Meet recording · Create meeting minutes with AI · Extract audio from a video and transcribe it · Compare plans and pricing