Managing sound and video settings during Teams meetings and calls for optimal communication
Couple solutions in meanwhile MSFT make our lives miserable:
Workaround 1 - Endless Printscreens and OneNote:
- Reduce the font of it and increase the print area -- both of these adjustments are configurable thru the Live Caption Config Pane. These options are inside "Caption Styles" -- why not "Captions Config" ?!?!? Haha my Lord!!
- These changes will sacrifice the useful area of your monitor in favor of the Captions being displayed in a wider area. There is no Captions "pop-out" feature. There is no option to move the captions to the side. There is only Top or Bottom, and if you are a small 14" screen like me, they will consume useful space of your screen.
- Print screen that portion of the screen over and over, to cover the totality of the snippet that you want to capture. If you need to capture the entire meeting then you will have to do that for the entire conversation.
- Paste those print screens in one OneNote Page one after another.
- For each of the print screens, right click on it and chose "Copy Text from Image". You will obtain the text that was written in the print screen.
- I have not tested using OneNote Copilot out of pure print screens to generate a meeting notes out of that Page alone. OneNote Copilot is so horribly badly implemented that I gave up on using it long back. Its Akiles heels is its built-in character processing limitation, that won't tell you until when it processed, it will process just a portion of your page and deliver you an output pretending that it processed the whole page, and there are no prompts that will make it process what is left.
- Be aware that if you are in a meeting, the option to "Copy Text from Image" won't be available in OneNote.
- If you only need the track record, OneNote is capable to perform searches over print screened texts, treating a print screen with text inside like pure text itself.
This will enable you to have the record of the conversation, of who said what, and although painful, you will be able to produce a meeting note at the end.
Workaround 2 - Your cellphone and Copilot:
- Get your phone and turn on Live Transcribe on it. It won't capture who said what, but it will capture what was spoken and every name mentioned. I have a Google Pixel and Google's Live Transcribe is even better than Copilot's one.
- Right after the meeting is done, go to your phone and press the button "Share Transcription" and chose OneDrive and save it to your desktop. The TXT file will appear right at your desktop.
- After exported, go to your transcribe settings and delete the history that was captured as, at least for mine, it doesn't create "conversations", it's one long string of words one after another. This step will also resolve any privacy concerns too.
- Open Copilot and configure a new Meeting Notes Agent and explain to the Agent what the conditions of the transcription file are. Watch videos on YouTube on how to do it.
- You will have a pre-configured mechanism able to interpret that fuzzy transcript and the output will be decently good.
- All what you will have to do is keep tracking is who owns the action items as names-to-action items are not always associated.
Hope these aleviate your pain, community, until MSFT revert this change or rolls out something better.