I can't copy the subtitles of a meeting

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?

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?

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!"

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

Exactly.

And frankly, there are many other ways to capture speech to text either on the same device or with another one, this was just the most convenient and accurate with real-time ease of use.

I already felt transcription and recap should be standard that anyone attending should be able to trigger. (Same with recordings).

The MOST infuriating thing is the block without notice and without effort to elicit feedback on the proposed block, etc.

This constant feature removal or change or moving us to new versions of software with fewer features or eliminating features we find useful - again without soliciting or listening to user input, is very frustrating, especially to people who actually understand the software and its potential to help us do our job better.

Agree there are potentially people who could use this wrong - why would you have them employed anyway.