The pandemic propelled various video conferencing tools to the mainstream, putting Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams at the forefront. With a strong hold on the enterprise and education markets, Microsoft Teams is a popular communication app among companies and schools. Much like Google Meet, Microsoft’s alternative also packs a lot of smarts, including live transcription, which is now making its way to the Microsoft Teams app for Android.

Transcription itself isn’t new to Microsoft Teams. Its web and desktop apps have had the feature since last year. While that covers most office goers who usually rely on laptops to attend video calls, it left a large chunk of mobile users in the lurch — until now. As announced by Microsoft, transcription for calls is finally coming to Microsoft Team’s Android app, which has over 100 million installs on the Play Store.

During an ongoing meeting, you can go to "More actions" to start or stop live transcription for the speakers. The new option is available for both one-to-one and group chats. Microsoft says the transcript will automatically start appearing in the meeting chat with appropriate speaker labels. However, you can also access the entire transcript after the meeting has ended through the "Files" section of the app.

Live transcription is one of the handiest features for any video conferencing tool that saves you from taking meeting notes manually while keeping pace with the speaker. Students can use it to keep a copy of their lectures and revisit anything they probably missed during class. On Google’s side, you get a similar feature with Google Meet, and even the Google Recorder app for Pixels does an excellent job of transcribing while you record.

Besides this new feature, Microsoft is also bringing instant polls during calls, schedule send for messages, and improved web experience to Teams with this big update.