Use live captions in a live event in Microsoft Teams

Teams live events will no longer be going away on September 30, 2024, as previously announced. While we still recommend switching to Teams town halls for new features and experiences, you can now schedule live events beyond September 2024.
For more information, please read this blog post for more information.

Live event attendees can view live captions and subtitles in up to six languages in addition to the language being spoken. Event organizers can select the languages from a list of over 50.

Set up live captions and subtitles

Organizers can enable live captions and subtitles for an event and choose the languages they'll be available in. To set up live captions and subtitles for your event, select the Captions box when you're scheduling your event.

: Live captions and subtitles are only available for live events produced using Teams.

Use the Translate to menu to add up to six languages attendees can choose to see captions and subtitles in, in addition to the language being spoken. For example, if the spoken language is English, but you know there’s an office in the Netherlands tuning in, select Dutch (Netherlands) so they can get captions in Dutch.

Supported spoken languages for this feature include English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Supported translation languages include Afrikaans, Arabic, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified, PRC), Creole, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Queretaro Otomi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Serbian (Latin), Serbian Cyrillic, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tahitian, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yucatec Maya.
If Captions isn’t there, contact your IT admin to turn this feature on.

Get the most out of captions and subtitles

Speak clearly, slowly, and directly into the mic.
Avoid locations with background noise.
Avoid having multiple people speaking at the same time.
Use the highest quality Teams-certified equipment available to you.

: Curse words will be starred out.

Download transcripts

After the live event has finished, click Calendar Meetings button in Teams and look up the live event. Under Live event resources, you’ll find Transcripts. You should see a transcript for each of the languages you selected for captions and subtitles. Select Download to download them.

For best results, open the files with Microsoft Word.

Use live captions and subtitles

Producer experience

Producers can control their own live captions and subtitles for the event from Settings Settings button .

To turn your own live captions and subtitles on and off, select My live captions.

To enable or disable attendee live captions and subtitles, select Attendee live captions. Attendees will get a notification when you make a change to this setting.