Transcribe Teams meetings on your own computer, with no Copilot licence

Scribe records a Teams meeting from your side of the call and writes the transcript, speaker labels and summary to your own disk. Teams itself transcribes on the Microsoft 365 business plans without Copilot, so if you have that button, use it; Scribe is for the meetings where you do not. Meetings are free while Scribe is in beta.

  • No bot
  • On-device
  • Windows, macOS
  • Speaker labels
  • Free in beta

Download Scribe Free plan for Windows and macOS. No card.

A meeting transcript with four labelled speakers, a waveform and timestamps

What Scribe does

It records the sound of the meeting, not the meeting

  • Both sides of the call

    Your microphone and the audio your computer is playing are captured at the same time, as two streams. The people on the call are recorded as clearly as you are, and Teams is left completely alone.

  • Speaker labels for up to four voices

    Voices are separated on your machine and labelled. Rename a label once, add a role and a company, and that name follows the voice through the transcript, the summary and the talk-time split.

  • Notes you can send on

    A summary, chapters that split the hour into topics, and action items with the person who took them on. A local model writes them, or your own cloud key if you supply one.

  • One application on Windows and macOS

    Windows 10 or later, and macOS 12 or later.

How it works

You join the meeting the way you always do

  1. Open Teams as usual

    No invite to change, no link to paste, no app to install inside Teams and no request sitting in an administrator's queue. Scribe sits beside the call rather than inside it.

  2. Start recording

    Press record, or let Scribe start on its own when it notices that a call application has taken the microphone. That watching works on Windows and on macOS 14.2 or later.

  3. The audio becomes a labelled transcript

    Speech recognition and speaker separation both run on your processor, so the transcript builds while the meeting is still going rather than after it.

  4. You get the notes

    Summary, chapters, action items and talk-time stats sit next to the transcript. Everything stays in your local history, where it can be searched later and exported as TXT, Markdown, SRT, WebVTT, CSV or JSON.

The licence question

Teams already transcribes, and Copilot is not the reason

Microsoft Teams includes live transcription with the business plans, such as Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Business Standard, and with Teams Essentials. You start it from the meeting's More menu and the transcript sits beside the meeting when it ends. It does not require a Copilot licence. The recap is where the extra licences come in. As of September 2026, intelligent recap, with its AI notes, tasks and chapters, needs Teams Premium or a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and the audio recap comes only with Copilot. The transcript itself needs neither.

If your organisation is on one of those plans and your administrator has left the feature switched on, start it from inside the meeting. It knows who is speaking, so the transcript carries their names, and it costs you nothing extra. You do not need us for that call.

That answer stops working in six situations.

Your licence does not include it, or an administrator turned it off. Plenty of organisations disable transcription tenant-wide, and plenty of people are on an account that never had it. Either way the button is not there, and looking harder will not produce it.

Another organisation runs the meeting. If you join from outside the organiser's company, you cannot start transcription or open the transcript afterwards, and if you join anonymously you see no transcript at all.

You want the transcript on your own disk. A Teams transcript lives where Teams puts it, under whatever rules your organisation has set, visible to whoever your administrator says it is visible to. Scribe writes an audio file and a transcript into a folder on your machine and nothing else happens to them.

Half your meetings are not on Teams. A candidate calls in on Zoom, a supplier sends a Meet link, a client rings your softphone. Scribe records the sound your computer is playing, so every one of those is the same job with the same notes at the end.

You want the summary without a licence per person. Summaries, chapters and action items are written on your machine by a local model, or by your own cloud key if you would rather use one. They are part of Pro — free while Scribe is in beta, and eight dollars a month for the whole application afterwards, rather than a seat added to everyone in the department.

The trade

It works with every conferencing tool and integrates with none

Scribe captures the audio your computer plays. That is the entire mechanism, and it has one large consequence in each direction.

The useful direction. There is nothing to install inside Microsoft Teams, no administrator to ask, no calendar to connect and no application review to wait out. Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, a browser tab, a phone lying on the desk on speaker. If it makes sound on your machine then Scribe hears it, and none of those products has to know that we exist.

The costly direction. Scribe cannot read anything Teams knows. It has no access to the participant list, so it cannot put real names on the voices by itself. It cannot see the chat, the invitation, the shared files or the reactions. It hears the meeting the way you hear it and that is all it has to work with. You rename the speaker labels once, by hand, and they are yours from then on.

Nothing joins the call either. No extra guest appears in the participant list, because there is no guest, and Teams sends no recording notice on our behalf.

That convenience does not move the responsibility. Recording other people stays yours to handle. Some jurisdictions need everyone on the call to agree, some need only one person, and many employers have a rule of their own on top of the law. Processing the audio on your own machine changes none of that. Saying at the top of the meeting that you are recording takes five seconds and settles it for the whole call.

What to know before you rely on it

Meetings are a Pro feature, free while Scribe is in beta, along with summaries, chapters and the panel where you ask questions about a recording. Live subtitles and file transcription are free.

  • Capturing your computer's audio needs macOS 12.3 or later and Screen Recording permission. Windows uses loopback capture.
  • Speaker labels cover up to four voices in one recording, which suits a call and not a workshop.
  • No participant names, no chat, no invitation. Scribe has the audio and nothing else, so the first pass calls people Speaker 1 and Speaker 2.
  • Twelve languages run on device. Automatic punctuation and number formatting are not available in every language yet. More languages are coming.
Live labels want six CPU cores, auto-start needs macOS 14.2, and the warning on machines under 16 GB
  • Starting a recording by itself needs macOS 14.2 or later, because that is where macOS lets an app see which application holds the microphone. Windows has no extra requirement.
  • Labels while people talk want at least six CPU cores. Below that, Scribe applies the speaker labels once the recording stops, and the transcript itself is unaffected.
  • The recording is written as an Opus file next to the transcript, so an hour of meeting costs very little disk.
  • On Windows, a machine under 16 GB of memory or without a GPU gets a plain warning before speaker separation or a summary runs, rather than an unexplained wait.

Download Scribe Free plan for files and captions. Meetings are free while Scribe is in beta.

Questions people ask

Can you transcribe a Teams meeting without Copilot?
Yes, and usually without us either. Live transcription comes with the Microsoft 365 business plans and with Teams Essentials, and it needs no Copilot licence. The recap is what costs extra: intelligent recap needs Teams Premium or Copilot, and the audio recap needs Copilot. Scribe is the answer when your plan, your administrator or another organisation's meeting has left you without that button.
How do I transcribe a Teams meeting without recording it?
Teams' own transcription runs without starting a recording, which is the cleanest route if you have it. Scribe transcribes an audio capture instead, so a file is written to your disk and you delete it once the transcript exists. For words on screen with no meeting file at all, live subtitles caption whatever your computer is playing and cost nothing.
Will other people be notified that I am transcribing?
Nothing joins the meeting and Teams sends no notice on our behalf, so the other side sees exactly what it would see if you were not recording. That makes telling them your job rather than the software's, and in some places it is also a legal requirement.
Can it tell who said what?
Speaker separation runs on your machine and handles up to four voices in one recording. It cannot read the Teams participant list, so the labels start as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 until you rename them, after which the names stay attached along with roles, companies and talk-time stats.
Do I need my IT administrator to approve anything?
Not for Teams. Scribe is an ordinary desktop application that records your own computer's audio, so there is no tenant setting, no app catalogue entry and no admin consent screen. You will need whatever permission your own machine asks for, which on macOS is Screen Recording.

Teams transcribes meetings on the business plans without Copilot. What it cannot do is follow you off Teams or leave the transcript of a conversation about redundancies on your own disk instead of your employer’s tenant. Those are the reasons to record from your side, and Scribe is the recorder that stays there.