How to Transcribe a Microsoft Teams Meeting
Where a Teams recording is stored, how to get the file out of OneDrive or SharePoint, and how to turn it into a transcript you can edit and export.
The Scriptorium team ·
Teams records to the cloud, not to your machine, and that is the part that trips people up: there is no file in a folder to find. The recording lives in OneDrive or SharePoint and you download it from there.
Teams can transcribe it for you
Teams has live transcription, and when it was turned on during the meeting the transcript is attached to the meeting afterwards — open the meeting in your calendar or in Chat and look for the Recap or Transcript tab. You can usually download it as .docx or .vtt from there.
As with every built-in transcript, it is a record rather than a document: the formatting is fixed, corrections do not travel with it, and what you can do with it afterwards is limited to what that tab offers.
Transcription has to have been on during the meeting. Nothing can reconstruct it afterwards except transcribing the recording itself — which is exactly what the rest of this page is about.
Getting the recording file
Where it lands depends on the kind of meeting, and this is the single most useful thing to know about Teams recordings:
- A channel meeting — the recording goes to that team's SharePoint site, in the channel's Recordings folder.
- Any other meeting — it goes to the OneDrive of the person who pressed record, in a Recordings folder.
- Open the meeting in Teams — in Chat, or in your calendar.
- Find the recording in the chat history, or open the Recap/Files tab.
- Open it in OneDrive or SharePoint, then choose Download.
- You get an MP4.
If you cannot see a download option, the file is shared with you but not yours to take — ask whoever recorded it. That is a permissions decision made by your organisation, and it is worth respecting rather than working around.
Transcribing the downloaded file
- Open video to text and drop the MP4 in.
- Wait for the transcript — the picture is ignored entirely, so a long call is cheaper to transcribe than its file size suggests.
- Correct names and any jargon while listening back to the parts that matter.
- Export as Markdown or plain text for a written record, or CSV if the transcript is going into a spreadsheet.
The advantage over the built-in transcript is what happens next: the text is editable line by line, corrections are re-indexed so search finds the corrected version, and you can search across every meeting you have transcribed rather than one at a time.
There is no Teams integration and no way to paste a Teams link. Download the recording and upload the file.
A note on confidential meetings
Plenty of Teams meetings should not be uploaded to somebody else's server at all — anything covered by legal privilege, medical confidentiality, or an internal policy that names approved processors. For those, the same software can be run on hardware you control: see self-hosted transcription. The honest guidance is to decide that before uploading, not after.