Live translated captions in Teams Town Halls for up to six languages

German post was automatically translated by DeepL and manually reviewed

If you remember, with the introduction of Teams Premium, Microsoft has restricted the possibility of live translated captions in meetings to the new Premium license.

In Town Halls, organizers without a Teams Premium license will soon be able to activate up to six languages (out of 40) for live translated captions. Live translated captions were previously not available for Town Halls.


Live Captions vs. Live Translated Captions

A distinction must be made between live captions. The difference between live captions and live translated captions is often overlooked in the documentation.

Live Captions

With Live captions, Teams can recognize what is being said in an event (meeting, webinar, or town hall) and caption the text in real time for the spoken language. There is no translation. Live Captions works for meetings, webinars, and town halls with a Teams service plan. Teams Premium license is not required.

Live Captions in Meeting
Live Captions in Meeting
Live Translated Captions in Town Halls

The change that is planned concerns Live Translated Captions in Town Halls and should be available by June.
An organizer of a Town Hall can select up to six languages for translation during the planning of the event without a Teams Premium license, with a Teams Premium license it is up to 10 languages.

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Update from 4 May 2024:
The rollout should be completed by June.
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Live translated captions in Town Halls
Understand town hall presenters better with live translated captions. Choose from up to six preset languages with Office and M365 offerings, or 10 preset languages with Teams Premium.

Auswahl von Live Translated Captions für Organisatoren (während der Planung)
Selection of Live Translated Captions for organizers (during planning)

During the event, Teams allows participants to select their language and attempts to translate the spoken text in real-time.

Auswahl von Live Translated Captions für teilnehmende Personen
Selection of Live Translated Captions for participants

Live Translated Captions in Meetings and Webinars

Live TranslatedCaptions in meetings and webinars require a Teams Premium license since July 2023. Without a Teams Premium license, the caption section is hidden.

Live Translated Caption in Meetings
Live Translated Caption in Meetings
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Enable / Disable Live Captions

The option for Live Captions / Live Translated Captions must be enabled for end users by a Teams administrator. It is enabled by default. It is the LiveCaptionsEnabledType property in a meeting policy.

LiveCaptionsEnabledType
Determines whether real-time captions are available for the user in Teams meetings. Set this to DisabledUserOverride to allow user to turn on live captions. Set this to Disabled to prohibit.

PowerShell

Microsoft has described the possible configurations for the meeting policy here.

Teams Meeting Policy Settings für Live Captions
Teams meeting policy settings for live captions

In the Meeting Policy in the section for Recording & Transcription.

Meeting Policy
Meeting Policy
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Tobias Asböck

Tobias is a Senior System Engineer with around ten years of professional experience with Microsoft 365 products such as SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams Collaboration, Entra ID, Information Protection, Universal Print, and Microsoft 365 Licensing. He also has 15+ years of experience planning, administering, and operating SharePoint Server environments. Tobias is a PowerShell Scripter with certifications for Microsoft 365 products. In his spare time, Tobias is busy with updates in the Microsoft 365 world or on the road with his road bike and other sports activities.

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