Hi, Insiders! I am Harin Lee, a Principal Product Manager on the Microsoft Teams team. I’m excited to share a new way to collaborate across languages in your meetings: consecutive interpretation in Interpreter.
Keep two-language meetings flowing with consecutive interpretation in Teams
Interpreter brings speech-to-speech translation to Teams meetings so everyone can participate in the language they're most comfortable using. Consecutive interpretation is a new mode in Interpreter for Windows, Mac, and the web that helps participants collaborate more naturally in meetings with two spoken languages. With this update, Interpreter now supports two modes: real-time simultaneous interpretation (launched last year) and a new consecutive interpretation mode designed for back-and-forth conversations.
With consecutive interpretation, the translation begins after each speaker finishes speaking. This creates a turn-based flow that more closely reflects how people naturally communicate in multilingual conversations. In addition, consecutive interpretation brings Interpreter onto the meeting stage for everyone to see and hear, making it easier to follow, participate, and stay aligned.
How it works
- After the meeting starts, as the meeting organizer you can click the More menu and select Turn on Interpreter.
- Select Consecutive interpretation, choose the two spoken languages from the drop down menus, and click Turn on.
- Interpreter will be added to the meeting stage, and everyone will be notified it’s on.
- Take turns speaking, and wait for Interpreter to translate after each speaker.
Tips and tricks
Consecutive interpretation is designed for interactive, two-way conversations across a language pair (E.g., Spanish and English). Simultaneous interpretation is suited for broadcast-style, listening scenarios across multiple languages.
Known limitations
Consecutive interpretation is available across 10 languages, supporting any language pair between them. Supported languages include Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.
Requirements
To enable the Teams client for the Public Preview, IT administrators must enable Show preview features in their update policy. Learn more.
For Targeted release, global admins can go to the Microsoft 365 admin center and give access to a select set of individuals or the entire organization. Learn more.
Availability
Consecutive interpretation is available for meeting organizers with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and Teams clients enabled for Public Preview.
During the preview period for consecutive interpretation, access is subject to available service capacity. Beyond preview, additional details will be shared when the feature becomes generally available.
Features covered in this blog roll out over time to enable us to monitor quality and performance, so some preview features may not be available to you right away. Also note that features may be paused, adjusted, or removed as part of that process.
Feedback
We’d love to hear what you think about this feature! Select the thumbs up or down buttons in your Copilot response, or select Settings and more > Feedback in the top-right corner of the Teams app, and then select either Report a problem, Give a compliment, or Suggest a feature to share your thoughts.
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