recording and transcripts greyed out when in a meeting with a Teams user outside of my org

Len Raphael 21 Reputation points
2025-10-07T17:28:21.2933333+00:00

can transcribe and record PTSN calls fine.

The only people I call who are using Teams are tech support people from various vendors who sent me an invite. One the other day told me other customers she meets w via Teams have no problem recording/transcribing her meetings with them. That nothing on her side is preventing it.

E5 license.

Mostly use local machine Teams.

Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams for business | Meetings and calls | Other
Answer accepted by question author
Anonymous
2025-10-07T19:40:28.2333333+00:00

Hi @Len Raphael, 

Thank you for posting your question in the Microsoft Q&A forum. 

Based on your description, you cannot turn on transcription and recording in a meeting despite of having an E5 license, this could be related to the organizer's organization meeting policies, your role in the meeting. In this situation, I would recommend contacting the organizer to verify the below points: 

  1. Ask them to start transcription and recording on their end 
  • Since you are joining a meeting invited from another organization, you are considered an external user, therefore, you don’t have permission to enable those. 
  • Start the transcription and recording themselves and share with you afterwards. 
  • In addition, if you need to initiate transcription and recording on your end, please ask them to promote you to an organizer or a presenter. 

Note: External users cannot access recordings and transcriptions except that they were shared explicitly. 

  1. Verify their organization's meeting policies 

User's image

  • Go to Recording & transcription 

User's image

  • Toggle meeting recording and transcription on. 
  • Save the policy. 

Note: If the organizer is an end-user, please ask them to contact their IT admin to take these steps. 

 

For more information, please refer to this article: I can't transcribe a meeting in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Support 

 

I hope this information is helpful. Please follow these steps and let me know if it works for you. If not, we can work together to resolve this.  

Thank you for your patience and your understanding. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.  

I'm looking forward to your reply.  

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment". 

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.     

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  1. Whispifys 0 Reputation points
    2026-09-04T13:57:19.6066667+00:00

    if you're the external participant, there is one thing you can do without the organiser.

    Live captions are not restricted the way transcription is. Any participant can turn them on for themselves in anybody's meeting — More (…) → Language and speech → Turn on live captions. They aren't announced to the room, and each line carries the speaker's name.

    They're not saved anywhere once the call ends, so they don't replace a transcript. But when you're a guest and the transcription button is locked, they're the only way to follow and copy what was actually said.

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  2. Len Raphael 21 Reputation points
    2025-10-08T20:10:26.23+00:00

    Yes it appears to be a setting on the side of the organizer who invited me, nothing on my side. I talked to a more knowledgeable person there who said in fact that they always have to do the recording and transcription. which they did.

    Thank you.

    PII removed

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