Turn on Live Captions in Teams Desktop

Last updated on May 14, 2026

Microsoft Teams live captions enhance accessibility by providing real-time, AI-generated text of spoken words during meetings and calls. These captions appear instantly at the bottom of the screen, show speaker identification, and are customizable in font size and color. Follow the instructions below to enable them in your Teams Desktop application.

Live captions in Microsoft Teams must be activated per meeting, rather than permanently for every meeting. While user-level settings for spoken language persist across meetings, the live caption feature itself must be toggled on manually.

For mobile devices, see our tutorial called Turn on Live Captions in MS Teams Mobile.

Directions

Open Teams Desktop

1. Open the Microsoft Teams desktop application.
2. Start or join your Teams meeting.
   • See our tutorial, Start a Meeting with Students in Microsoft Teams, for more guidance.
3. Click the More actions (…) button in the meeting control panel at the top of the meeting window.
4. Select Language and speech
5. Click Show live captions.
   • The caption window should appear below the meeting window and will begin to display spoken text.
   • Note: Any participant can turn on live captions for themselves without needing organizer permission. The captions are private and only visible to the user who enabled them.
6. Click on the small upward arrow icon at the top right of the caption screen to open captions in a new window.
   • You can move the window anywhere it’s convenient, as well as enlarge or make it smaller.
7. Click on the X in the top right of the window to close it and return the captions to the main Teams screen.

Customize Caption Language

1. Click the Settings icon (gear)  in the top right of the captions screen.
2. Choose Language Settings.
3. Choose the language you want to view your captions in from the drop-down menu.
   • Set the meeting’s spoken language to the language people are speaking for more accurate captions. 
4. Click the X at the top right to close the Language screen.

Change Caption Appearance and Panel Height and Position

1. Click the Settings icon (gear) in the top right of the captions screen.
2. Choose Caption Styles.
3. Choose the font color, background color, and font size.
   • Available font sizes are small, medium, large, and extra-large.
4. Click on the drop-down menu for Panel height and choose small, medium, or large.
5. Click on the drop-down labeled Panel position to choose whether to display the Live Captions at the top or bottom of the meeting screen.
6. Click the X at the top right to close the settings screen.

Stop Live Captions

1. Click the More actions (…) button in the meeting control panel at the top of the meeting window.
2. Select Language and speech
3. Click Hide live captions, and the caption window should disappear.

Have Questions?

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