Microsoft Teams transcription that does not depend on the organiser's settings

Teams transcription is turning what is said in a Microsoft Teams meeting into text. Teams does it itself when its policies allow: people in the organiser’s organisation can start a transcript, guests and people from another organisation cannot, and the transcript is saved to the organiser’s OneDrive. Dalm, a Mac app, takes the text on your side instead: it records your microphone and the sound Teams plays on your Mac, whatever your role in the meeting, and nothing joins the call. Speech is recognised on your Mac and the audio goes nowhere; the transcript syncs to our servers automatically, and a third-party language model reads it to write the summary. There is a Free plan.

What Teams itself turns into text, and who can start it

Way	What it takes	Who can start it
Teams’ live transcription	Transcription allowed by policy, both for the organiser and for the person who starts it; Teams for desktop	People in the organiser’s organisation, in a role the organiser allows; not guests, not people from another organisation. The transcript is saved to the organiser’s OneDrive, and by default organisers and co-organisers download it
Teams’ live captions	Captions allowed by your policy	You, for yourself; Teams does not save them
Intelligent recap	A transcript, and a Teams Premium or Microsoft Copilot licence	Depends on the licence and the transcription policy
Dalm, on your own Mac	A Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and a Dalm account; it asks Teams for nothing	You, whatever your role; nothing is added to the meeting, so saying that you record is on you

If you organise the meeting inside your own organisation, transcription is allowed there, and the text only needs to live in Teams and OneDrive, Teams’ own transcript may be all you need — and everyone in the meeting sees that it is running. Dalm is for the other cases: you are a guest or from another organisation, the policy has transcription turned off, or you want the text in your own account next to your other conversations rather than in someone else’s OneDrive. Who may record a Teams meeting, where the recording goes, and what the inviting organisation’s rules can forbid are in the guide to recording a Teams meeting.

Taking the text of a Teams call on your own Mac

Dalm notices when the Teams app — the new one or the classic one — takes the microphone and asks in a notification, “Record this meeting?” — one press on Record and it starts. It asks the same app no more than once in ten minutes, and the setting “Offer to record when a call starts” switches the question off; ⌃⌥M, or the Meeting button in the menu bar, starts a recording without it. In Teams in a browser the app does not pick up the call by itself: the offer can come only while a calendar event with a Teams link is under way, a path not yet checked on a live call, so ⌃⌥M is the sure way there. Two things are recorded: your microphone, and everything your Mac plays, which on a call means the other people’s voices — and any notification sound too. The meeting’s list of people does not change. If the other side comes through as silence, the recording screen warns “the other side is not heard” while there is still time to fix the sound. How this differs from a note taker that joins as a participant is on the page comparing meeting recorders.

Where the audio of a Teams call and its text end up

The speech in the recording is recognised on your Mac, and the voices are separated there as well; the audio is not sent to us or to the model provider. The text is what travels: line by line, with times and voice numbers, the transcript syncs to our servers automatically, and no setting keeps it on the Mac. That text then goes to a third party, whose language model writes the summary. Once the text exists, the audio is deleted. Teams’ own transcript follows Teams’ rules and lives in the organiser’s OneDrive; this page describes only what Dalm does. Piece by piece, it is set out on privacy.

Microsoft Teams meeting notes: transcript, summary and quotes

After the call, the recording becomes a transcript in which every line has a time and a voice. Your lines are yours from the start — they come from your microphone — and the others are separated from the call’s sound. Names are optional and the summary does not wait for them: until you answer, a voice carries the app’s guess or a number, and in the naming step a guess may be marked “Suggested by Dalm — check before you agree.” In the transcript and the summary a guess looks like any other name until you confirm or change it. The notes you type while you listen are what the summary grows from.

In the meeting summary, each point keeps a word-for-word quote. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. Everything you say lands in one archive you can search: meetings, phone calls, conversations in the room, and what you dictate to a model. A Teams call with a client sits there beside a Zoom call and the talk in the corridor after both.

A Teams recording you already have

If a Teams recording reached you as a file, bring it in. Dalm takes audio or video from 0.3 seconds to four hours long and reads it where it is — “The file is processed on this Mac · the original stays where it was” — and the transcript made from it syncs to our servers like any other. This works on the Free plan. Dalm brings in audio and video files, so a transcript you downloaded from Teams stays a document of its own. Who gets a Teams recording in the first place is in the guide to recording a Teams meeting.

What Dalm does not do in a Teams meeting

• It records sound, not the meeting window. The chat, a shared screen and the video are not in the transcript.
• It does not tell anyone. Nothing is added to the meeting, so say at the start that you are recording; the app reminds you before your first meeting. The rules on recording consent differ by place, and the organisation that invited you can forbid what the law allows — if it does, that rule stands.
• It does not put the text into Teams. The transcript is in your Dalm account, not in the meeting chat or the organiser’s OneDrive; someone else reads it if you share the summary or invite them to that meeting.
• It does not hand over a finished transcript mid-call. What shows during the call is a draft; the real one appears after you stop — from the call to usable text.
• It keeps no copy of the sound: nothing to play back, nothing to save as audio.
• Calls under 100 words are not counted as meetings, and voices are not recognised from one Teams call to the next.
• It is not on Windows, and it needs an account.

After the first Teams call: Free and the paid plans

The recording, the transcript and the summary of a Teams call come with the Free plan, whatever your role in the meeting, and Free is a plan rather than a trial. Dalm needs a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and an account; while it is not public, the way in is the waitlist. What the paid plans add is on the pricing page. Dalm’s plan for groups is called Team, and it has nothing to do with Microsoft Teams: it gives a group one dictionary, so client and product names are spelled the same way in every transcript, plus shared templates and tags — more on working as a team.