Live Multilingual Captions for Education

Unfortunately, we are not licensed for the live translation. I have been trying to get our tech admin to request a trial so we can see if the Premium license supplies what we need (i.e., does it work the way we want/need it to). No one in the district has made this happen so we are stuck and I am trying really hard to find something that can support those students. We do not need licensing for the entire district so the second part would be: if this works the way we want/need it to, can we purchase the premium license only for the instructors who need to use this with their students (or only for the students who need the translation)?

Thank you for your insight. I'd appreciate anything you can do to help us move forward with trialing this with a couple of instructors and their students to see how it can work. It's especially important in our career tech labs where the language is even more specialized than in a typical academic classroom.

Hi,

Based on Microsoft’s current documentation, the best path to validate this is a small Teams Premium trial assigned to the instructors who will organize the class sessions. Microsoft’s Teams Premium admin trial provides 25 licenses for 30 days, and the trial can be started by an admin from either the Microsoft 365 admin center or Teams admin center.

To learn more, please visit:

• Roll out a Teams Premium trial
• Manage Teams Premium for your organization

The key licensing point is this: for live translated captions in Teams meetings, if the meeting organizer has a Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot license, then all meeting participants can use translated captions and transcription without each participant needing their own Premium license.

This means you should not need to license the entire district, and for your use case the most practical approach would likely be licensing the instructors who create and run the meetings.

I would recommend asking your technology administrator to run a limited pilot with:

• 2 to 3 instructors who teach classes with multilingual learners
• A small group of students who need translated captions
• At least one career tech lab session, since that will be the strongest test of specialized vocabulary
• A Teams meeting where the teacher presents using PowerPoint Live in Teams

PowerPoint Live in Teams allows the teacher to present slides while students follow along on their own devices. Attendees can also personalize their viewing experience, including independent slide navigation, high contrast viewing, magnification, and slide translation. The live translated caption experience would come from Teams meeting captions, not directly from the PowerPoint deck itself. (You can read more at: Use live captions in Microsoft Teams meetings).

Before testing, the admin should also confirm that captions are allowed in Teams meeting policies:

1. Go to Teams admin center.
2. Select Meetings > Meeting policies.
3. Open the policy assigned to the pilot instructors and students.
4. Set Live captions to Not enabled, but users can enable.
5. Save the policy.

If you also want to test translated transcripts, the admin should confirm that Transcription is enabled in the applicable meeting policy. Live translated transcription requires the organizer to have Teams Premium, and transcription must be turned on in policy.

Additional details are available at the link: Admins - Manage transcription and captions for Teams meetings

Here are steps for the instructor during the pilot:

1. Schedule a Teams meeting for the class.
2. Join the meeting as the organizer.
3. Select Share content.
4. Under PowerPoint Live, choose the presentation, or select Browse OneDrive / Browse my computer if the file is not listed.
5. Ask students to join the Teams meeting from their own devices.
6. In the meeting controls, select More actions > Language and speech > Show live captions.
7. Students can open Caption settings > Language settings, confirm the meeting spoken language, turn on Translate to, and choose their preferred caption language.

About your licensing question:

• If the pilot works as needed, the likely purchasing model would be to buy Teams Premium only for the instructors who need to organize these translated-caption sessions. Microsoft’s documentation explains that Teams Premium is a per-user add-on license, but some features are organizer-based. For organizer-based features, when the organizer has Teams Premium, those capabilities are made available to attendees during that meeting.
• Students generally would not need Teams Premium if they are attending a meeting organized by a licensed instructor. However, if a student needed to use translated captions in meetings where the organizer is not licensed, then that individual student would need an eligible license to see the Translate to option.

Because career tech vocabulary can be highly specialized, I recommend testing with real classroom content rather than a generic meeting. For the most accurate captions, Microsoft recommends speaking clearly and directly into a microphone, avoiding background noise, and avoiding multiple speakers talking at the same time.

Teams may also use meeting context such as the meeting subject, invitation, participant names, and attachments to improve caption accuracy, so using a clear meeting title and attaching the related lesson materials may help during testing.

Thank you again for taking the time to share this important feedback and for bringing attention to a need that may affect many educators and students. I hope the information above helps clarify the current options and gives your team a practical next step to explore.

Kind regards,

If the answer is helpful, please click "Yes" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".      

Note: Please follow the steps in forum documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.  

Thank you! I will pass this on to our admin. I appreciate your sharing this information with me.

Lisa