“I recorded a Teams meeting with several stakeholders discussing our quarterly project updates, but I don’t have time to review the entire hour-long recording. Is there a way to quickly get the key points and action items without watching the whole thing? I’ve heard about Copilot but don’t know how to use it for meeting summaries. Can someone explain how to set this up and use it effectively?”
Understanding the meeting summary challenge in modern workplaces
In today’s fast-paced business environment, professionals attend numerous meetings but struggle to capture and retain important information. Microsoft Teams meetings generate valuable content through discussions, decisions, and action items that often get lost without proper documentation. Copilot for Microsoft 365 addresses this challenge by providing AI-powered meeting summaries directly within Teams, saving time and improving information retention across your organization.
How Copilot transforms Teams meeting documentation
Copilot for Microsoft 365 integrates with Teams to automatically generate comprehensive meeting summaries from transcripts. This solution works for both live meetings and recorded sessions, providing key points, action items, and decisions in an easily digestible format. Before implementing this feature, you’ll need a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license and proper configuration of Teams meeting policies in your tenant.
Setting up and using Copilot for Teams meeting summaries
Verify licensing and enable Copilot features
- Ensure your organization has purchased and assigned Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses to users who need meeting summary capabilities, as this premium feature isn’t included in standard Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
- Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center using your global administrator credentials and navigate to “Billing > Licenses” to verify your organization has the appropriate Copilot licenses available.
- Assign licenses to specific users through the admin center by selecting users and adding the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, which enables all Copilot capabilities including meeting summaries.
- Allow 24 hours for license assignments to fully propagate throughout your tenant before users can access all Copilot features in their Teams applications.
Configure Teams meeting policies for transcription
- Access the Teams admin center and navigate to “Meetings > Meeting policies” to ensure transcription is enabled for users who will be using Copilot for meeting summaries.
- Edit the appropriate meeting policy and locate the “Recording & transcription” section, then toggle on “Transcription” and “Allow transcription of meetings” options to enable this prerequisite feature.
- Consider creating a specific meeting policy for Copilot users if you don’t want to enable transcription for everyone in your organization, then assign this policy to licensed users.
- Communicate to users that they must start transcription during meetings for Copilot to generate summaries, as the AI requires transcript data to analyze meeting content.
Using Copilot during live Teams meetings
- Join or start a Teams meeting and locate the Copilot icon in the top meeting toolbar, which appears as a sparkle or star icon next to the meeting controls.
- Click the Copilot icon to open the Copilot pane on the right side of your meeting window, where you’ll see AI-powered assistance options for the current meeting.
- Enable meeting transcription by clicking the “More actions” (three dots) in the meeting controls and selecting “Start transcription” if it hasn’t started automatically.
- During the meeting, Copilot actively analyzes the conversation and provides real-time insights, which you can view by selecting “Meeting recap” in the Copilot pane.
Generating summaries after meetings conclude
- Access past meeting recordings in Teams by navigating to the chat where the meeting occurred or through the Calendar by clicking on the completed meeting.
- Open the meeting recording and locate the Copilot button in the recording playback interface to generate a summary of the recorded meeting.
- Request specific summary formats by typing prompts like “Summarize the key decisions from this meeting” or “Create a list of action items with assignees” in the Copilot chat interface.
- Share the generated summary with meeting participants by clicking the “Share” button in the Copilot interface, which can send the summary to the meeting chat or export it to other formats.
Pro tip: For the most accurate summaries, encourage meeting participants to speak clearly, identify themselves before speaking, and avoid talking over each other, as these practices significantly improve transcription quality and resulting Copilot summaries.
Troubleshooting Copilot for Teams meeting summaries
- If Copilot icon is missing from your Teams interface, verify your license assignment in the Microsoft 365 admin portal and ensure you’re using the latest version of the Teams desktop or web application.
- When meeting transcription fails to start automatically, manually enable it through the meeting controls menu by selecting “Start transcription,” as Copilot requires transcript data to generate meaningful summaries.
- For poor quality summaries that miss important points, ensure meeting participants speak clearly and one at a time, as overlapping conversations can reduce transcription accuracy and affect summary quality.
- If language-related issues occur with international teams, configure the primary meeting language in advance through meeting options, as Copilot performs best when the transcription language matches the spoken language.
- When experiencing delayed summary generation for longer meetings, be patient as processing time increases with meeting duration, or try requesting specific sections of the meeting to be summarized rather than the entire session.