Teams already writes the transcript. 1Presence just reads it.

Microsoft Teams makes the transcript. You just have to let 1Presence read it.

When transcription is switched on in a Teams meeting, Microsoft writes a full, speaker-attributed transcript and keeps it for you. 1Presence reads that transcript afterwards and files it in your vault as notes and a summary — no recorder joins the call, and it costs nothing. But Microsoft guards that transcript carefully, so two things have to be true: someone turns transcription on in the meeting, and your organisation gives 1Presence permission to read it. Get both in place once, and every transcribed Teams call flows in on its own.

The free, no-bot path exists only for work or university Microsoft 365 accounts — the kind your employer or university gives you, run by an IT admin. That is because the transcript and the permission to read it both live inside an organisation's Microsoft tenant. A personal Microsoft account (an outlook.com or hotmail.com login), free Teams, or Teams Essentials has no tenant and no admin — so there is nothing to switch on and no one to grant access. Those calls use the recorder instead, and that path is just as good; it simply joins the call to capture it.

On a personal or free account there is no admin to ask and no setting to find — so skip the rest of this page and head to the Meeting Recorder. Everything below is for work and university Microsoft 365 accounts.

Transcription is a standard Teams feature — you do not need Teams Premium or Copilot for it. Any work or university Microsoft 365 plan that includes Teams has it:

What is left out: Microsoft Teams (free), Microsoft Teams Essentials, and personal Microsoft 365 (Personal / Family) consumer accounts — none of these can produce a transcript 1Presence can read, so they use the recorder. Teams Premium and Copilot add live translation and AI summaries on top, but they are not needed for the plain transcript 1Presence reads.

Not sure which plan you are on? Your admin can confirm it under Microsoft 365 admin centre → Billing → Your products, and can check a specific person with the built-in Teams transcripts diagnostic tool.

Teams only writes a transcript when someone starts it — there is no transcript for a call where nobody turned it on. There are two layers: your admin allows it once for the organisation, then anyone starts it in the call itself.

1. 1

   Admin: allow transcription (one-time)

   In the Teams admin centre, go to Meetings → Meeting policies, open the Global policy (or a custom one), set Transcription to On, and save. For tenants created since early 2025 this is already on by default.

2. 2

   In the call: start the transcript

   During the meeting, open More (…) → Record and transcribe → Start transcription. A live transcript appears, and Teams files the finished one in OneDrive afterwards. Microsoft’s walkthrough is here: View live transcription in a Teams meeting.

3. 3

   Tip: make it automatic

   So no one has to remember, an organiser can switch on auto-transcription for their own meetings in Teams → Settings → Captions and transcripts, or have every meeting they host start it by default. Then the transcript is always there for 1Presence to read.

Recording and transcription are separate switches — 1Presence only needs the transcript, so you don’t have to record the call to get your notes. (For the video file itself, that is the recorder’s job.)

This is the part most people miss. Connecting Microsoft 365 in 1Presence is not enough on its own: Microsoft treats meeting transcripts as sensitive, so a tenant admin has to explicitly authorise 1Presence to read them. It is a quick, one-time job — but it has to be done by someone with Teams admin rights, and it is run in PowerShell (there is no button for it in the admin centre).

1. 1

   Install and connect

   In PowerShell (Windows, Mac or the browser-based Azure Cloud Shell), the admin installs the Teams module, then signs in with an admin account:

   Install-Module MicrosoftTeams
   Connect-MicrosoftTeams

2. 2

   Create the access policy for 1Presence

   The 1Presence application ID is fixed and the same for every organisation. Run:

   New-CsApplicationAccessPolicy -Identity "1Presence-Transcripts" -AppIds "d893e384-5c54-4df2-b21c-fc124881db5a" -Description "Allow 1Presence to read meeting transcripts"

3. 3

   Grant it across the organisation

   Grant it tenant-wide to cover everyone, including people who join later. (To limit it to named people instead, swap -Global for -Identity "[email protected]" per person.) Allow up to ~30 minutes to take effect:

   Grant-CsApplicationAccessPolicy -PolicyName "1Presence-Transcripts" -Global

Microsoft’s reference for this step is Configure an application access policy, and the command details are in New-CsApplicationAccessPolicy. Microsoft is rolling out an additional admin control for app access to transcripts through 2026 — your admin allows 1Presence there too once it appears in your tenant.

If 1Presence ever says it cannot read your Teams transcripts even though Microsoft 365 is connected, this policy is almost always the missing piece — pass these three commands to whoever runs your Microsoft 365, and you are set.

With transcription on and the access policy granted, connect Microsoft 365 in 1Presence once. From then on you never touch a settings page — you talk, and it happens:

One thing 1Presence can’t do for Teams: browse past calls you never transcribed. Teams only keeps a transcript for meetings where someone turned it on — so for an old call with transcription off, there is nothing to read after the fact. Switch it on going forward, or use the recorder for the next one.

If you don’t have the work or university Microsoft 365 account the free path needs — a personal or free Teams account, transcription left off, or you’d simply rather not involve an admin — the Meeting Recorder covers all of it. A participant named 1Presence joins the call, records it, and writes up the transcript and summary into your vault — metered at $0.55 an hour, billed by the minute, from the same balance as everything else. It works the same on Teams, Google Meet, Zoom and Webex.

There are two ways to use it. On demand: just give the 1Presence chat a meeting link or the joining details any time and ask it to join — it goes straight in. Automatically: turn the Meeting Recorder on in the Connectors panel and connect your Microsoft 365 account, and 1Presence joins your meetings by itself — it watches your calendar and sits in on any entry that has a meeting link, with a tap-to-skip heads-up before each one.