Teams Caption Saver

Save Microsoft Teams live captions to a folder you choose. Capture only — nothing is uploaded, no summarization.

Teams Caption Saver writes the live captions of a Microsoft Teams meeting to a file while the meeting is still running. Turn on live captions in Teams in your browser and the extension starts by itself. Each settled caption line is appended to a UTF-8 JSONL file named after the meeting, with its speaker and a timestamp. A metadata record at the top of the file carries the meeting title, start time and organiser. Optionally the same transcript is also written as a readable Markdown file. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO This extension is capture only. It does not summarise, translate, or send your captions anywhere. There is no account, no server, and no analytics. The transcript is written to the folder you pick, and nothing else happens to it. It makes exactly one request in its whole lifetime, and only if you use the optional recording module: reading your own recording's transcript from your own SharePoint, through a link that the page itself provided. Nothing ever leaves your machine, and no third party is involved. RECORDED MEETINGS (OPTIONAL) A recorded Teams meeting has a server-side transcript: the one behind the Transcript tab of the SharePoint player. Add your organisation on the options page, and opening that tab also saves the transcript, in the same file format. This is off until you add an organisation. Adding one asks the browser for access to that organisation's two recording sites — <your organisation>.sharepoint.com and <your organisation>-my.sharepoint.com, which is where Microsoft keeps meeting recordings — and nothing else. Keep the Transcript tab open and the extension walks the panel the player puts on your screen, scrolling it from wherever you had it and putting your position back afterwards. Where it can reach every entry, that panel is what gets saved: the whole meeting, with the name the player itself put on every line. Where it cannot reach the end, the words come from the transcript file the player downloads instead — a file, so it is complete however long the meeting ran — and the names are matched onto it by timing. Any stretch it could not read is marked Unknown rather than guessed at, and the popup says how much of the panel it covered. With the tab closed the transcript is still saved in full, with every line Unknown, and the popup tells you so. Where your organisation hands out no downloadable file either, and the extension cannot prove it read the panel to the end, nothing is written at all — and the popup says that, rather than saving a transcript with a hole in it. Where the player fetches the transcript in readable form, the extension simply reads a copy of the answer the player already received. Where your organisation's transcripts are stored encrypted, the player receives a link to your own transcript instead. The extension follows that one link, and that is its single request: to your own SharePoint, for your own meeting. SharePoint serves it from Microsoft's own download host, as it serves any download, and the result goes straight to your folder and nowhere else. The extension builds no address of its own, stores no credential, and talks to nobody else. WHERE FILES GO Choose an output folder once on the options page and every transcript is written there. That folder is the only place anything is ever written: until you choose one, nothing is captured at all. Live captions go into a live-captions subfolder and recording transcripts into a recording-transcripts subfolder. Files are named after the meeting title followed by YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM, so every capture of a recurring meeting sits together. Chinese, Japanese and other non-Latin titles are preserved as-is. Nothing already written is ever overwritten or truncated. Opening a recording you have already saved normally writes nothing at all, and where it does write, it always adds a file beside the ones you have. It adds one in these cases: - The transcript has been corrected since you saved it. - More of the speakers can be read this time than the saved version names. - The saved file is no longer in the folder being written to — you deleted it, or you have since chosen a different output folder. - You press Save again in the popup. That button overrides the extension's judgement that no new file is needed, so it writes even when nothing has improved — unless what it renders is identical in content to the file you already have, in which case nothing is written and the popup says so. The popup names which of those happened rather than saying the same thing about all of them. The optional Markdown copy is one setting covering both: turn it on and a readable copy is written beside the file, for a live meeting and a recorded one alike. RELIABILITY Captions are written every few seconds rather than at the end, so closing the tab does not cost you the meeting. The final line of a meeting is flushed when captions stop. Lines that Teams rewrites after first showing them are updated in place, and lines that scroll out of the caption panel are still saved. If the live captions go away for any reason — you switch to another view, or captions are turned off — capture stops there, and everything captured up to that moment is already saved: nothing is lost. When captions come back, capture continues in a new file beside the old one, which is left as it is, so one meeting can land as several files; they all carry the same meeting title and differ only by timestamp, which is what lets them sort together. REQUIREMENTS AND LIMITS You need Microsoft Teams in the browser; the Teams desktop app is not supported, because its captions are not reachable from a browser extension. Timestamps record when a caption settled, not when the words were spoken. Teams recognises one spoken language per meeting, the one set under Language and speech, so a mixed-language meeting is only as good as that setting. Teams controls the caption panel and can change it at any time; if that happens, the extension says so in its toolbar popup instead of silently saving an empty file. YOUR RESPONSIBILITY Recording or transcribing a meeting may require the consent of the other participants and may be restricted by your employer's policy or by law where you are. Please check before you capture, and tell the people in the meeting. This software is provided as is, with no support commitment. MIT licensed: free to use, change and share, at work or anywhere else, and the licence text is inside the package you install. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Microsoft. Microsoft, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Stream are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.