Teams transcripts language set up, proposing a way that would actually work

Copper Contributor

Hi

 

I work in Western Africa, we are constantly using both English and French. Most of our meetings are with countries of the region (so, not in person but over Teams), and are often recorded, with transcripts, but most people just don't get it and don't figure out that they have to manually go to the transcript window to adjust the spoken language. As a result, many transcripts are gibberish. This is a great lost opportunity and value for us. We could in theory have a written record of the meetings, i.e. a searchable one, and also a readable one, as opposed to the videos, which personally I don't like (too slow and not searchable).

It's really a waste, a lost opportunity.

What would be best is to have every person's spoken languages registered so that the transcript would identify which one the person is speaking. For many people it would be just one, so, no mystery there, and for the rest, there would usually not be too much to chose from (usually 2, and even if the person speaks more, it's not often that they have meetings in all their known languages).

 

We have a lot of meetings at the regional level that involve both anglophones and francophones, so just setting the language once in the transcript window does not cut it. I have tried to change it as the conversation goes, it's not workable.

The fallback option would be to set the planned spoken language at the moment the meeting is being set up, but the first option would of course be much more useful (assuming you can actually detect the spoken language with some ease).

Looking forward for those improvements.

5 Replies
I love that idea, do you find it to be the case that a given person will always use the same language in a given meeting? I'm in a very mono-lingual environment at the moment, but I think in some contexts in W Europe for example, people will switch between (say, French, German and Dutch ) languages quite fluidly.

@_Alain_ 

 

Great topic! I think there are also potential solutions like:

  • creating meetings per region of the world or language audience (FR / EN).
  • educating collaborators to set up accurate transcripts language in meetings.
  • post-meeting downloading and archiving transcripts in geo one drive folders (Automate/RPA).

I think the optimizations and some of the suggestions you are formulating on top of this could be routed here: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/ad198462-1c1c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472. Let me know if this helps. I think Microsoft is currently working on some enhancements related to this topic.

 

Dimitri

Yes, most frequently, at least in my case, the same language is used throughout the meeting, because generally you choose a common language. It does happen though that we have meetings where the same people end up speaking several languages, for no particular reason than the fact that we all speak several common languages, or, as indicated in my post, because for some of our regional meetings, we necessarily have both francophones and anglophones, so we end up saying everything twice, in one language and then the other. But, my point is that with priori knowledge of the one or two languages that the person knows, it should be much easier to properly identify the spoken language, even if switching from one to another with no previous notice. Well, I hope so.
Dimitri, this is exactly what I needed! Thank you so much! I knew this existed somewhere! I was just so unable to find it, for some reason. Thanks for this link!!