Microsoft Teams transcription language settings

As far as I know, Teams doesn’t currently let you restrict Auto Detect to a custom shortlist like “English + Chinese only.” You basically have two options: leave the spoken language on Auto Detect and let Teams choose from the supported languages, or manually set the spoken language to one specific language in the transcript/caption settings.

Microsoft actually recommends setting the spoken language explicitly when accuracy matters. If your meetings regularly switch between English and Chinese, I’d look at the multilingual speech recognition setting instead. With Copilot or Teams Premium, the organizer can enable multilingual speech recognition, and participants can select their own spoken language. That’s designed more for genuinely multilingual meetings than relying on one global Auto Detect setting.

You want Teams to recognize only English and Chinese because automatic detection sometimes selects unrelated languages. Your Business Premium and Copilot context matters, but licensing does not provide a documented custom two-language detection allowlist. Microsoft's current guidance instead lets participants select their spoken language in multilingual meetings. Enable multilingual speech recognition in the meeting's Recording and transcription options, then have each participant open caption or transcript language settings and explicitly select the language they are speaking. Where Auto-detect is selected, replace it with the appropriate English or Chinese option. Keep the spoken-language setting separate from Translate to: translation changes the output language, not what the speaker actually said. Test this in a short meeting with the same participants before relying on the transcript. If recognition remains incorrect with explicit language settings, record the meeting details and Teams version for your administrator to investigate with Microsoft.