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How to Turn On Live Captions in Teams (and Who Sees Them)

#a11y #productivity #tutorial #microsoftteams

Turn on Teams live captions on desktop or mobile, set the spoken language, get translated captions, and fix the menu item when it's missing.

Summary

  • On desktop, go to More actions, Language and speech, Show live captions. On mobile, go to More options, Turn on live captions.
  • Captions you turn on show on your own screen, so each person who wants them has to switch them on.
  • Translated captions need Teams Premium or Microsoft Copilot, held by the meeting organizer or by you.
  • If Show live captions is missing, an admin's meeting policy may have Live captions set to Off.

Turn on live captions in a meeting

You switch captions on from inside the meeting. Microsoft's live captions guide has a Desktop tab and a Mobile tab, and the steps below follow them.

On the Teams desktop app:

  1. In the meeting controls, select More actions.
  2. Select Language and speech.
  3. Select Show live captions. Captions start appearing on your screen.

The same menu entry then reads Hide live captions, which turns them off.

On the Teams mobile app:

  1. In the meeting controls, tap More options.
  2. Tap Turn on live captions. The same place later offers Turn off live captions.

The guide has no separate steps for Teams in a browser. If the menu there looks different from the steps above, use the desktop app, which is the version Microsoft documents.

To change how captions look in the Windows or Mac desktop app, select Caption settings, then Caption styles, next to the captions and pick a color, position and style. Microsoft also lists font size and the number of lines. On mobile, tap More options, then Caption style. Changes apply straight away and carry over to later meetings.

Who sees them

Only you. The top-voted answer on Microsoft's Q&A forum, posted in 2021 and marked helpful by more than 200 people, says captions appear on the screen of the person who turned them on, and nobody else in the meeting is told. The same answer says that if you're the participant recording the meeting, the captions don't appear in the recording.

So every participant who wants captions turns them on for themselves. Microsoft's admin documentation calls live captions a per-user policy that decides whether the Turn on live captions entry is available to that person. One participant can have it in the menu while a colleague in the same meeting doesn't. Captions come with speaker attribution, and Microsoft's guide says people can choose not to be identified in them.

Set the spoken language

Captions follow the meeting's spoken language. When Teams detects a different language, the spoken language settings in Microsoft's guide say it prompts the organizer, a co-organizer, or whoever started the transcript or the feature that turned on transcription. That person can select Yes, change it to switch to the detected language, or Settings to pick one by hand.

To set it yourself:

  1. Select Caption settings, to the right of the captions.
  2. Select Language settings.
  3. In the Meeting spoken language dropdown, pick the language everyone is speaking.
  4. Select Update.

Microsoft's admin page lists more than 50 spoken languages and regional variants for transcription, from Albanian and Arabic to Vietnamese and Welsh. If you're a participant and can't reach the setting, ask the organizer to change it. Microsoft's guide says other participants can reach the meeting spoken language only while transcription is turned off.

Translated captions

Translation is the one caption feature that needs a licence. Microsoft's guide says live translated captions come with Teams Premium and Microsoft Copilot, and whose licence counts depends on the meeting:

  • If the organizer has Teams Premium or Microsoft Copilot, every participant can use translated captions without a licence of their own.
  • If only some participants have one, only those people see the Translate to toggle.

With captions on:

  1. Select Caption settings, then Language settings.
  2. Check that Meeting spoken language is correct.
  3. Turn on Translate to and pick the language you want to read.

The target languages include English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Your admin also has to leave the Live captions policy on "Not enabled, but users can enable", because setting it to Off turns translated captions off too.

Town halls work differently. The organizer preselects up to six languages for attendees, or ten with Teams Premium.

If the menu item is missing or captions look wrong

Go through these in order.

  1. The policy is Off. In the Teams admin center, Meetings → Meeting policies → the policy assigned to you → Live captions has two values: "Not enabled, but users can enable" (the default) and "Off". With Off, people on that policy can't use live captions in meetings or events. Only an admin can change it, so send them that path.
  2. You're on the mobile app in a government cloud. Microsoft says captions aren't yet available there.
  3. The captions are in the wrong language. Set the spoken language as described above.
  4. Translate to is missing. Ask who organized the meeting and whether they have Teams Premium or Microsoft Copilot.
  5. The text is inaccurate. Microsoft's tips: speak clearly and slowly into the microphone, stay close to it, avoid background noise, keep people from talking over each other, and use Teams-certified equipment. Teams also hides obscenities behind asterisks, so a row of them is deliberate.

Captions disappear after the meeting

Microsoft's guide says caption data is permanently deleted once the meeting is over. A transcript is the saved record. The admin documentation says it carries timestamps and speaker attribution and sits with the meeting recording in OneDrive and SharePoint. Transcription is its own setting, and both the organizer and the person who starts it need it turned on.

To keep what was said, see our guides on saving Teams captions and downloading a Teams transcript. Admins also control whether organizers can stop participants from copying or forwarding live captions and transcripts, and that per-organizer setting is on by default.

If Teams can't caption it for you

Microsoft says organizers can arrange human-generated CART captions, which is worth asking about when machine captions aren't good enough. The admin documentation points to its CART guide.

If a policy blocks captions, or you want translation and nobody in the meeting has the licence, an app on your own device can caption the sound. Vocena, the app we make, runs on iPhone and iPad (iOS / iPadOS 26 or later) and on Mac (macOS 15.5 or later). On a Mac it can caption audio playing on that Mac, including a Teams call. On iPhone, captioning another app's audio needs a physical device running iOS 27. It listens to your device and doesn't join the meeting, and it labels each line as microphone or system audio, not by speaker. Captions are free with no time limit, and translation is paid. Our guide to live caption apps for Mac compares it with other apps, and live captions on every device covers phones and tablets.

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