Microsoft Teams meeting transcripts are about to become more profane, at least if your organization's admin enables a setting. This week, Microsoft rolled out the option to have profane words appear uncensored in meeting transcripts.
Depending on your workplace culture, the change may have little impact. Other organizations may discover that their meeting transcripts suddenly become a lot more colorful.
The feature applies to both live transcription and saved meeting transcripts. Profanity filtering remains enabled by default. Live captions work differently and continue to follow each participant's existing profanity settings.
The release notes do not indicate whether meeting participants will be notified when an organization chooses to disable profanity filtering in transcripts.
Censorship can be a sensitive topic, even in professional environments in which people have worked together a long time. Many people draw different lines when it comes to profane language, so it makes sense to have individual settings as well as organization-level settings.
There are situations in which exact wording matters. Internal investigations, HR complaints, legal disputes, or compliance reviews may benefit from an unfiltered transcript that reflects precisely what was said during a meeting.
Microsoft describes the feature in more depth in its release notes for admin features:
Microsoft Teams: Admins can control profanity filtering in meeting transcripts: Teams administrators will be able to use a meeting policy to control whether profane words are masked in live transcription and saved meeting transcripts. Filtering remains on by default. When an organizer is assigned a policy that turns filtering off, profane words can appear without masking in both the live and saved transcript, while live captions continue to follow each participant's existing profanity setting.
In addition to the profanity setting, Microsoft added a feature that pops calls in a new window to improve multitasking. The company also added a way to require pre-meeting consent for all participants of a meeting.
For most Teams users, this change probably won't alter day-to-day meetings. But for organizations that rely on transcripts for records, compliance, or investigations, having the option to capture conversations word-for-word could matter far more than a few colorful words.
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