How to transcribe a Microsoft Teams recording (and where Teams hides it)
The meeting is over, someone pressed Record, and now you need the text: for the minutes, for the people who missed it, or for one quote you want to get exactly right. Teams can give you a transcript, but only if the right switch was on, only to the right people, and only for a limited time. Here is where everything lives, and two ways to end up with a clean document.
Where Teams puts the recording
This is the part that sends people searching. According to Microsoft’s documentation (checked in September 2026):
- Scheduled and ad hoc meetings: the recording goes to the organizer’s OneDrive, into a folder called Recordings, even if the organizer didn’t attend.
- Channel meetings: the recording goes to the channel’s SharePoint site, under Documents → Recordings.
- 1:1 and group calls: it goes to the OneDrive of whoever pressed Record.
The quickest way in is usually the meeting chat. The recording appears there as a card, and opening it takes you to the file in OneDrive or SharePoint.
Two details catch people out:
- Attendees can watch, but usually can’t download. By default the organizer and co-organizers can edit, share and download the recording. Everyone else from the same organization gets view-only access, and external guests get nothing until the organizer shares it. If the Download button is missing, that is why: ask the organizer.
- Recordings expire. New recordings and transcripts are deleted after 120 days by default. An admin can change that, and accounts on the education A1 plan are capped at 30 days. An expired file goes to the recycle bin, where a work or school account keeps it for 93 days unless an admin changed that too. If a meeting matters, download it now.
For planning, Microsoft puts a one-hour recording at roughly 400 MB.
Where the Teams transcript is (if there is one)
A transcript only exists if someone turned on transcription during the meeting. It is included in Teams, but your admin’s meeting policy decides whether you can switch it on at all. And if the organizer turned off Copilot for a meeting, recording and transcription are turned off with it.
If it was on, open the meeting chat, go to the Recap tab and choose Transcript. You can download it as .docx or .vtt, and by default only the organizer and co-organizers can do that. Every line carries the speaker’s name and a timestamp.
Route 1: you have the transcript, make it readable
The .docx that Teams produces is a list: a name, a timestamp and one short line, repeated a few hundred times. The .vtt is the same thing in subtitle format. The words are all there, but nobody wants to forward either of them.
Download the .vtt, drop it into our free subtitle converter, choose Transcript and click Copy for Word. The converter picks up the speaker names Teams writes into the file, glues the fragments back into paragraphs and starts a new paragraph whenever the speaker changes. The names arrive in bold, and each one is a field you can rename, for example to turn an account name into a first name. It all runs in your browser, so the transcript never leaves your computer.
Route 2: you only have the recording
Transcription was off, you are not the organizer, the meeting ran in two languages, or you need more than the words. As long as the MP4 exists, you can still get the text:
- Download the MP4 from OneDrive or SharePoint, or ask the organizer to send it.
- Upload it to Speecho. The audio is extracted in your browser, so even an hour-long recording uploads quickly.
- Turn on speaker identification, so the result comes back as labelled dialogue instead of one block of text.
- Export → DOCX for a Word document with real paragraphs. From the same transcript you can also get a summary with action items, or a translation into another language.
Speakers come back as Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on. Rename each one once and every line updates. You pay for the minutes you upload, with no subscription, and the first 15 minutes are free.
Which route should you take?
If Teams made a transcript and you can download the .vtt: route 1, free, two minutes. If there is no transcript, you aren’t allowed to download it, or you want a summary or a translation on top: route 2. And if this is a meeting you’ll need again in six months, download the recording today, whichever route you take. The 120-day clock started when the meeting ended.
