I can't copy the subtitles of a meeting

Dear Microsoft Team,

Please enable people to copy the captions during the meetings. I've ADHD and I am a non-native English speaker, and the captions have been incrediably useful for me during the meetings, especially when I could copy and paste them to translator and copilot to give me a summary. I do not wish to ask for everyone's permission in daily session and copy the transcribe.

Have you ever consider dyslexia and ADHDers? They need the function to give them summary in their daily work. Please consider accessibility. I just want my function back.

Sincerely,

Yue

Here how this changed came into place:

**Root Cause:**Someone (ONE ****!!) exposed his company by making misuse of the feature, and a top dog of his company filed a complaint to MSFT for having that feature always available, threatening of suing MSFT.

• "Microsoft Executive: Gather the team. We need to prevent that lawsuit"
• "Microsoft Architect: We can just disable it for now until we pipeline a decent solution"
• "Microsoft Executive: I loved it, do it!"
• "Microsoft Architect: But that will cause huge discomfort to the end users who make good use of it, which is 99.999999% of them."
• "Microsoft Executive: I don't care! We have to prevent MSFT from being sued! Block it!"
• "Microsoft Architect: It's gonna take a long time until we can rollout a decent feature."
• "Microsoft Executive: I don't care! We have to prevent MSFT from being sued! Block it!"
• "Microsoft Architect: We are going to start seeing many complaints in our Community because of it."
• "Microsoft Executive: I don't care! We have to prevent MSFT from being sued! Block it!"
• "Microsoft Architect: People may be fired because they can't perform their functions anymore as they heavily rely on being able to copy snippets of the meeting for further review."
• "Microsoft Executive: I don't care! We have to prevent MSFT from being sued! Block it!"

Root Cause: Someone (ONE ****!!) exposed his company by making misuse of the feature, and a top dog of his company filed a complaint to MSFT for having that feature always available, threatening of suing MSFT.

Microsoft Solution:

• Poor Implementation: Block the feature across the board and blame "privacy". Effort: 2 Story Points ($).
• Good Implementation: Enable a capability for Company's System Admins of toggle On/Off the ability for individual users to copy/paste contents from Live Captions, and transfer the responsibility to that to the System Admins. Effort: 200 Story Points ($$$$$).

Guess which approach did MSFT chose? OF COURSE the one with least effort/cost. I just hope that this is the concept of agility/MVP and MSFT will roll out something better soon. Can someone find that out?

Honestly, I’m not convinced by the compliance/security excuse. Anyone can simply take a screenshot of the conversation with captions on—and with image-to-text tools, extracting the text is still a reasonably straightforward process. It feels nonsensical to remove this feature when you could just write down what’s being said anyway, but this change makes everything much less accessible.

“Oh no, you copied what someone said ad verbatim instead of rushing to writing it down yourself—and now you might use external tools to extract text from a screenshot as a workaround for our poorly planned design choices!”

Who's making these terrible decisions at Microsoft?

This is not a Movie where if I miss what was spoken, who cares? This is WORK! WE DO CARE AND WE NEED THAT INFORMATION TO PERFORM OUR WORK!

This was another of those changes that 1 individual in Microsoft in his tiny world thought it was a good idea "for privacy purposes", right? But at the end it was a disastrous idea. An ignorant that doesn't see beyond his narrow view angle that such feature has far greater benefits that Microsoft didn't even realize.

Just observe how many use cases were shared in this conversation here to demonstrate versatile capability that Live Captions had. If anything was to happen to it, it should be enhance and not limit. For a variety of reasons many individuals rely on Live Captions to perform their functions! For some of us, not having the Live Captions will determine our very future in the company as what was spoken may be in a different language, or may be in a terminology that you are not familiar with, or you are attending 2 meetings at the same time and you don't rely on the host to send a meeting notes (very few people do it), or you can't use Copilot as MANY organizations prohibits the use of it. It's just endless the number of use cases that Live Captions enabled and it's now just gone. You don't want to buzz the Meeting Host to turn on transcription all the time.

Microsoft just made the life of hundreds, if not thousands, miserable! Please don't tell me that if a company has Teams Premium then this feature can be enabled! Please don't tell me that! This would bring the prestige of MSFT to the sewer level, a dirty movement far worse that what Apple ever did.

Remember when we had that beautiful search capability inside Outlook and MSFT removed it in favor of that search bar at the top? The argument was to be aligned with the go forward search mechanism that all other tools had, and guess what? Outlook is the only tool that you use that search bar, you don't use it elsewhere ever because they are useless! Only the Outlook search is somewhat relevant, but became super limited.

Remember when you were copying a message in Teams and MSFT decided to bring the header of the copied text automatically? Took 3 years and hundreds of complaints for MSFT to remove that stupid header from the copied text. This was a great example of a single stupid individual thinking that his idea was great, causing consequences to the world.

With enough complaints by everyone, MSFT will re-enable it. It's just a matter of the noise to reach to the right eyes and ears in MSFT to get this change reverted. Keep complaining to your IT department and as your IT to open cases to MSFT. Keep answering this chat here asking when is the date to re-enable it. Keep making noise!