Teams admins can now unmask profanity in transcripts

Meeting transcripts in Microsoft Teams are about to get more candid. Microsoft this week rolled out a setting that lets an organization show profane words uncensored instead of masking them.

Nothing changes until an admin acts

Profanity filtering stays enabled by default. The control sits in a meeting policy, which Teams administrators manage. If an organizer is given a policy with filtering turned off, swearing is no longer masked, either in the live transcript or in the one saved afterwards.

For some teams the filter will hardly matter. Others may open a transcript and find it far saltier than before.

Captions play by different rules

Live captions are a separate case. They continue to follow each participant's existing profanity setting, whatever the organization's policy says for transcripts.

So the captions one person sees and the saved transcript can end up differing in how they treat the same word.

Why exact wording can matter

Windows Central points to internal investigations, HR complaints, legal disputes and compliance reviews. In those cases an unfiltered transcript reflects precisely what was said in the meeting.

Lines about swearing differ from person to person, even among colleagues who have worked together a long time. That is why individual settings sit alongside the organization-wide control.

Organizations that rely on transcripts for records, compliance or investigations could care far more about capturing conversations word for word.

Two other additions

The same update brought a feature that pops calls into a new window, which should help with multitasking. Microsoft also added a way to require pre-meeting consent from all participants of a meeting.

Source: Windows Central