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How to add auto captions/subtitles to your MS Teams recordings

This guide will walk you through how to upload your Microsoft Teams meeting recordings to Microsoft Stream for processing with auto transcription (subtitling) and sharing. Transcriptions are big boost for accessibility as they allow your learners to have access to a texted-based version of the speech in your meeting recording.

Get the most out of your captions

Automatically generated captions are rarely 100% accurate, but you can take some steps to get them as accurate as possible. The following is some guidance from the MS Teams support documentation on getting the most out of the captions feature:

To make sure your live captions are as accurate as possible, try to follow these best practices:

  • Speak clearly, slowly, and directly into the mic. As your distance from the mic increases, captions may become less accurate.
  • Avoid locations with background noise.
  • Avoid having multiple people speak at the same time.
  • Use the highest-quality Teams-certified equipment available to you.

Notes: 

  • If someone is speaking with an accent, captions may be less accurate.
  • Obscenities will be starred out.

“With Azure Cognitive Services, we’re able to get transcription accuracy of 90 percent or better.”

Customer quote published by Microsoft.

Locate and upload your Teams meeting recording

Microsoft has announced that in Q1 of 2021, Teams meeting recordings will no longer be saved to Microsoft Stream, Moving forward, all meeting recordings will be saved to OneDrive. So ……

Download your Teams meeting recording

In your teams meeting posts menu tab, find your meeting and click on its recording thumbnail picture:

A new OneDrive video player window will open, select download to save your recording as an MP4 video file to your computer

Upload your video file to MS Stream

Once downloaded, it can then be manually uploaded into CU MS streams (web-link below) N.B. you may need to use your CU user email (e.g. 1234@coventry.ac.uk) / password to log in:

https://web.microsoftstream.com/studio/videos

Click the upload icon at the top right of any page or just drag and drop new videos to one of your groups or channels. You can upload multiple videos at the same time.

Customise your video settings

Video language

Select the language spoken in the video. This will enable a closed caption file for supported languages to be automatically generated.

Permissions – Allow everyone in your company to view this video

When checked, everyone in your organization can see the video. This will mean that your video available for viewing company-wide

Captions

Closed captions are a text version, in the original language, of what’s spoken in the video. When a video has a caption set, viewers can click the CC button on the player while watching a video to show the captions under the video.

If you’ve selected a supported Video language in the Details pane for the video, then the Autogenerate a caption file check box will be checked. This means a caption file will be automatically generated.

Publish and Share

Once your video has been uploaded, and you are done setting up your video, you can press the Publish now button at the bottom of the upload card. This will make the video available to those you’ve shared it with as soon as it’s done processing

Share

Select the share icon on the bottom of the upload card …..

….. to get a copy of a link to the video.

(or alternatively click the embed tab to get the embed code for the video).

Further information

Author

  • Simon Cheung

    Simon is an Educational Technologist at CUOL - Coventry University Online Limited. I'm an active member of the 'Inclusive Curriculum - Community of Practice' group; and also a member of the 'Equality, Diversity & Inclusivity subcouncil' (HLS).

Updated on October 29, 2021

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