Create a transcript from a Microsoft Teams meeting

In this post, we'll see how to create a transcript for a Microsoft Teams meeting. Its easier than you think.

Initial thoughts on the blog
Hello! Its been a while. I'm going to try to update things more. Rather than use my blog I've been documenting back in my Word/Text documents. The whole reason I started this blog! And I noticed I'm not using them as much as I did when I'd use this blog. I'd link back to the stuff all the time. So I'm going to get back into that. 

Won't necessarily always be about Dynamics 365 or Power platform. It'll be a grab bag. But should be relevant for anyone doing implementations. Even if its just adjacent. This one is Teams and Stream. so there you go. 

Scenario
Even before COVID, people would miss important meetings all of the time. And then they'd be behind. So people took to recording meetings to document and allow for review of content at a later date. Often even just an audio file. This was especially important when it came to requirement meetings or just brain dump sessions.

The problem is no one is going to sift through a series of 3hr recordings or watch long meetings in an unorganized fashion. And notes often have misinformation, things out of context, unintentional biases, etc.

Transcripts are a good alternative. Searchable, can be turned into notes, etc.

Solution
Record the meeting in Teams and use MS Stream's embedded AI to generate a transcript. 'Transcript' used lightly. Its actually closed captioning tied to the video. But you can extract out the file.

How to

1. Record the Teams meeting
2. Once the meeting is recorded in Teams, Teams should automatically upload the file to Stream.
3. Once that's complete, the file will look like in Figure 1. 
4. click the '...' and select 'Open in Microsoft Teams' like in Figure 1. 
5. Once you're on the recording in Teams, click the '...' and select 'Update video details' e.g. Edit the Steam recording (Figure 2 below)
6. Select the language of the recording. 
7. Click on the 'Autogenerate a caption file'
8. Wait until the captions are processed by MS Stream (Figure 4)
9. Click on 'Download file' (Figure 5)
10. You can open the .vtt file in IE, Notepad, etc without changing the file name. I changed the file name in my screenshot just bc that's what I do but you don't have to. (Figure 6)
11. This file will have parity to the captions in Stream (Figure 6)
12. At this point you now have a txt file transcript as well as a video with searchable transcript and embedded captions in the file (Figure 7)
13. NOTE: The transcript/captions will not be perfect. If you want to edit, you can do that as well. Figure 8

Figure 1 - Open the Teams recording in MS Stream

Figure 2 - Edit the Stream video via 'Update video details'

Figure 3 - Select the language for the file and you can auto generate captions. 

Figure 4 - On the video, captions will be autogenerated. This could take a while after selecting the language. 

Figure 5 - Download the caption file (VTT format). You can edit it and reupload with any changes you want. 

Figure 6 - Viewing the completed caption/transcript data. 

Figure 7 - You can turn on captions in the video to see them in realtime. 

Figure 8 - Edit the transcript in Teams while watching the video.