Summary

Live captions turn spoken audio into text on screen in real time — for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, for anyone working in a noisy room, and for the moment a colleague's microphone turns them into a robot. This article covers captions inside a Teams meeting, captions across everything Windows 11 plays, and transcription: the separate feature that gives you the text of a meeting after it has finished.

In this guide

• 1. Enable Live Captions in a Teams Meeting
• 2. Change the Caption Language in Teams
• 3. Enable Live Captions System-Wide (Windows 11)
• 4. Customise Caption Appearance (Windows 11)
• 5. Start and Stop a Transcript in a Teams Meeting
• 6. Download the Transcript After the Meeting
• The Live Captions Option Is Missing
• Captions Are Transcribing the Wrong Language
• Captions in a Recording Are Not the Same Feature

Before You Start

• Microsoft Teams (desktop, web, or mobile) for meeting captions and transcripts.
• Windows 11, version 22H2 or later, for system-wide live captions.
• No admin rights required for any step here.

Instructions

1. Enable Live Captions in a Teams Meeting

Turn on real-time captions during a meeting.

Captions are yours alone. Turning them on draws text on your screen only — nobody else in the meeting sees them, and nobody is told you switched them on.

1. Join or start a Teams meeting.
2. Click More actions in the meeting controls — the ⋯ button on the meeting toolbar.
3. Select Language and speech > Show live captions.
4. Captions appear along the bottom of the meeting window, a line or two at a time, with each speaker's name beside what they said. You can also read them at the top of the screen, or pop them out into a separate window. A right-side panel joins those positions in the August 2026 Teams update, which is rolling out now.
5. To turn them off, click More actions > Language and speech > Hide live captions. The text disappears from your screen and nothing else about the meeting changes.

On the Teams mobile app:

1. Tap More options in the meeting controls.
2. Tap Turn on live captions. Captions appear at the bottom of the screen.
3. Tap More options > Turn off live captions to stop them.

Note: Teams renamed this menu item. If your Language and speech menu reads Turn on live captions rather than Show live captions, it is the same option under its former name — the mobile app still uses the older wording.

2. Change the Caption Language in Teams

Set the spoken language so captions transcribe the words people are actually saying.

The Meeting spoken language is the language Teams listens for. When it is wrong, captions do not come out as a rough translation — they come out as nonsense, because the recogniser is straining to hear English in a room speaking German. This is a per-meeting setting: it does not carry over to your next meeting.

1. With captions running, select Caption settings to the right of the captions on your screen.
2. Select Language settings.
3. Open the Meeting spoken language dropdown and choose the language people are speaking.
4. Select Update. Captions restart in that language within a few seconds.

If the Caption settings control is not visible on screen, take the long route: More actions > Language and speech > Show live captions > Open caption settings > Language settings.

Note: Teams is consolidating these controls. In the August 2026 update, now rolling out, the gear icon in the live captions pane opens a single menu holding the spoken language, caption styles, and profanity filter settings together, rather than sending you through separate settings panels. That menu also carries a toggle to turn live captions on by default for all your meetings, and a thumbs-up or thumbs-down control for giving feedback on the captioning experience. Until it reaches you, the route above is the one that works.

Two things worth knowing about who may change this:

• The meeting organizer, co-organizers, and whoever started transcription can change the meeting spoken language at any point.
• Everyone else can open the language settings only while transcription is switched off.

The same Language settings dialog holds Your spoken language, which tells Teams the language you speak in a meeting where more than one is in the room, and a setting to translate captions into a language of your choice while people carry on speaking theirs.

3. Enable Live Captions System-Wide (Windows 11)

Caption all audio played on your computer.

1. Press Win + Ctrl + L. A caption bar appears at the top of the screen.
2. The first time you turn it on, Windows asks for your consent to process voice on the device and prompts you to download a speech file for your language. Accept both. The download happens once and needs a connection that one time only.
3. Any audio your PC plays — a meeting, a video, an app — is transcribed into that bar as it plays.
4. Press Win + Ctrl + L again to turn captions off.

You can also reach it through Settings:

1. Press Win + I to open Settings.
2. Go to Accessibility > Captions.
3. Turn the Live captions toggle On.

To caption a language other than the one you set up, select the Settings button in the captions window, choose Change language, pick your language, and let Windows download its speech file. On Windows 11 version 23H2 and earlier, added languages come from Settings > Time & language > Language & region instead.

Note: This feature captions what your computer plays. It transcribes the other people in a meeting through your speakers or headset; it does not transcribe you speaking into your own microphone.

4. Customise Caption Appearance (Windows 11)

Change the look of the caption text.

1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Captions.
2. Under Caption style, choose one of the preset styles, or click Edit to change:
   • Font colour and size.
   • Background colour and opacity.
   • Window colour.
3. The style applies to captions everywhere Windows captioning is used. You can switch back to a preset at any time; nothing else on the system is affected.

From the caption window itself, the shortcut is the Settings button > Preferences > Caption style, which opens the same page.

Teams captions are styled separately. Select Caption settings > Caption styles beside the captions in the meeting to change their colour, size, and position on screen.

5. Start and Stop a Transcript in a Teams Meeting

Start a live transcript so the words spoken in the meeting survive after it ends.

Captions go when the meeting goes. A transcript does not — it is a text record attached to the meeting that you can read, search, and download later. If you want anything in writing afterwards, this is the feature to use, not captions.

1. In the meeting, click More actions in the meeting controls.
2. Select Record and transcribe > Start transcription.
3. Confirm the meeting language when Teams asks, then click Confirm. Getting this wrong is what produces an unreadable transcript, so check it rather than clicking through.
4. Every participant sees a notification that the meeting is being transcribed. There is no quiet way to do this, and that is deliberate.
5. To stop, click More actions, hover over Record and transcribe, and select Stop transcription. Everything captured up to that moment is kept — stopping ends the recording of new text, it does not discard what was already written.

The organizer, co-organizers, and presenters can stop and restart transcription during the meeting. An attendee cannot.

6. Download the Transcript After the Meeting

Save the meeting transcript as a Word document or a subtitle file.

1. Click Chat in the left app bar and open the chat belonging to the meeting that ended.
2. Click the Recap tab at the top of that chat.
3. Click Transcript. The full text opens, with each line attributed to the person who said it.
4. Click the arrow beside Download and pick a format — .docx for a Word document you can read and edit, or .vtt for a subtitle file that lines up with the recording.
5. The file saves to your Downloads folder and is yours permanently, whatever later happens to the copy in Teams.

Note: The transcript stays reachable from the meeting chat and the Recap tab until the organizer deletes it or its expiry date arrives. Transcripts are stored in the meeting organizer's OneDrive alongside the recording — How to Find a Teams Meeting Recording covers where that is, and how to stop it deleting itself.

Troubleshooting

INFO

Windows 11 Live Captions processes audio on your own device, so once the speech file has downloaded it keeps working with no internet connection. Teams captions and transcription are processed in the Microsoft 365 service and need the same connection the meeting itself does.

Symptom / Error	Potential Cause	Solution
No live captions option in the Teams menu	Looking in the wrong menu, or turned off by policy	Check More actions > Language and speech first, then see The Live Captions Option Is Missing.
Captions read as nonsense words	Meeting spoken language is set wrong	Set it in Caption settings > Language settings (Step 2).
Captions are inaccurate but readable	Background noise or unclear audio	Ask speakers to use headsets and mute when they are not talking. Microphone quality is the largest single influence on accuracy.
Windows live captions do nothing	Running Windows 10	System-wide live captions need Windows 11 version 22H2 or later. Use Teams meeting captions (Step 1) instead.
Windows asks to download a language file	Speech file not yet installed	Accept it. The download runs once, and captions work offline from then on.
Start transcription is missing or greyed out	You are an attendee, or transcription is off by policy	Ask the organizer to start it. If it is missing for them too, see the ticket wording in The Live Captions Option Is Missing.
The recording has no captions	Transcription was off when it was recorded	Captions and recording captions are different features — see Captions in a Recording Are Not the Same Feature.

The Live Captions Option Is Missing

Work through these in order, because the first one accounts for most of it.

You are looking in the wrong place. On the desktop and web apps, captions moved into a submenu: More actions > Language and speech > Show live captions. They are not on the top level of the ⋯ menu any more. On the mobile app they are the other way round — More options > Turn on live captions, with no submenu.

Your organization turned them off. An administrator can disable live captions for your account through Teams policy, and when they have, the menu item does not exist at all. Nothing you change on your own machine brings it back, so stop hunting through settings. Raise a ticket and send them: "Live captions are turned off for my account in Teams. Please enable live captions in the Teams meeting policy assigned to me." If you use captions because of a hearing difficulty, say so in the same message — that changes the request from a preference into an accessibility need, and it is usually handled by a different queue.

Transcription is missing too. The same Teams policy governs transcription, so both tend to disappear together. Add a second line to the ticket: "Please also enable transcription in the same policy — I need meeting transcripts I can read afterwards." If Start transcription is missing for you but present for the organizer, that is a role difference rather than a policy one, and the organizer starts it (Step 5).

While you wait, caption the meeting from Windows instead. Windows 11 live captions are part of Windows, not part of Teams, so a Teams policy does not reach them. Press Win + Ctrl + L during the meeting and Windows captions the audio coming out of your speakers or headset, which is everyone except you. It is not as tidy as the built-in captions, and it works today.

Captions Are Transcribing the Wrong Language

The Meeting spoken language is set per meeting and resets afterwards, so a meeting series in a second language needs it set every time. Change it with Step 2.

If the dropdown is greyed out, transcription is running and you are not the organizer, a co-organizer, or the person who started it. Ask one of them in the meeting chat: "Could you set the meeting spoken language to [language] in Caption settings? The captions are transcribing the wrong language."

One distinction that catches people out: setting the spoken language tells Teams what to listen for. If what you want is to read captions in a different language from the one being spoken, that is caption translation, which lives in the same Language settings dialog and leaves the spoken language alone.

Captions in a Recording Are Not the Same Feature

Live captions and recording captions come from two different places, and turning on the first does nothing for the second.

• Live captions are drawn on your screen while the meeting runs. Teams does not save them. When the meeting ends, they are gone, and no setting recovers them afterwards.
• Closed captions on a recording exist only when transcription was running at the time the meeting was recorded. That decision is made during the meeting and cannot be applied to a recording later.

So the rule is short: if anyone will want the text afterwards, start transcription (Step 5) at the beginning of the meeting. Captions alone leave nothing behind.

One more trap worth knowing if you tidy up your files: closed captions are not fully supported once a recording is moved or copied out of the folder Teams saved it to. Leave the .mp4 in its Recordings folder and share a link to it rather than moving the file.

Related Articles

• How to Record a Teams Meeting
• How to Find a Teams Meeting Recording
• How to Use Voice Typing on Windows
• How to Adjust Text Size on Windows
• Understanding Teams Meetings — Features, Roles, and Best Practices
• Understanding Windows Accessibility Features — A Quick-Reference Guide

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