Microsoft Teams' live transcription feature is here for GCC

What you need to know

• Microsoft Teams' live transcription feature is rolling out to GCC.
• This feature allows people to see what has been said during calls.
• It is also considered an accessibility feature.

Microsoft Teams releases features constantly, be they entirely new inclusions or old ones that haven't quite reached every corner of the Teams ecosystem. Today's news update from the Teams front is that the platform's live transcription feature is here for GCC (which stands for Microsoft's Government Community Cloud).

The feature ID on this one is 82836, and it can be tracked via the Microsoft 365 roadmap, where all updates are found for both Teams and most of Microsoft's other major services. Be sure to have a feature ID handy unless you want to get lost in the sea of features.

As for 82836 specifically, which is entitled "Microsoft Teams: Live Transcript for scheduled meetings in GCC," here's how Microsoft describes it: "Teams Meetings now have a real-time transcript during their meetings as well as a post-meeting transcript. This will help users in real-time recall what has been spoken during the meeting as well as review the meeting after the fact."

Beyond an entry on the roadmap, Microsoft has also written up a sizeable blog post for the release, detailing the various utilities of having a live transcript of conversations.

"Live transcription can make your meetings more productive and inclusive for participants who are deaf or hard-of-hearing or have different levels of language proficiency," the post says. "Participants in noisy places will also appreciate the visual aid."

So for those in the public sector who need an assist on the hearing front, the written text of transcripts should be useful. Or, alternatively, they're also good if you tend to tune out during meetings and need a quick refresh of what your colleagues were talking about a few seconds ago.