Writing meeting minutes from the Teams transcript

1Four moves between the meeting and the minutes

Two tiers exist in Teams. The first is included in your licence: it transcribes live, with speaker name and timestamp. You start transcription through More actions, Record and transcribe, Start transcription, after confirming the spoken language. The transcript is stored in the organiser's OneDrive. By default, only the organiser and co-organisers can download it, as .docx or .vtt. The second tier is intelligent recap, with AI notes, tasks, chapters and speakers. It requires Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot, as does Copilot during the meeting.

Your tool is therefore Copilot Chat, which reasons on what you give it and nothing more. The .docx is the right format, documented by Microsoft and easy to proofread in Word. The file is kept in your OneDrive. You can delete it at any time, and it is never used to train the models.

Three traps come before the prompt. The transcript captures everything, asides and personal data included: remove them. Names of people and products are often garbled: correct them, or give Copilot the mapping. The transcript expires after 120 days by default: store the approved minutes somewhere else.

The prompt follows the rule for attached files, with one extra requirement. Every decision points to the timestamp of the passage that supports it. The minutes become checkable in a minute, and invented decisions stand out.

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2A disagreement that stays a disagreement

A project manager has transcribed a one-hour progress meeting, then downloaded the .docx. She corrected two supplier names and deleted five minutes of small talk about a colleague's holiday. She now attaches the file to Copilot Chat.

Weak prompt:

Write the minutes of this meeting.

Summarised answer: three paragraphs of smooth prose. They announce a "decision" to postpone the launch that nobody took. No action has an owner, and a supplier name has turned into an ordinary word.

Strong prompt:

I am attaching the Teams transcript of the progress meeting of 8 September (file transcript.docx: timestamp, speaker name, what was said). Write minutes for the participants and for their manager, who did not attend the meeting. Required structure: 1. Purpose and attendees; 2. Topics covered, one paragraph per topic in meeting order; 3. Decisions taken, with the person who made the call; 4. Points disagreed on or postponed, with each person's position; 5. Open questions. Rely only on the attached file. If an expected piece of information is not in it, write "not found in the transcript". For every decision, give the timestamp of the passage that supports it. 500 words maximum, neutral tone, in English.

Summarised answer: the launch postponement appears in section 4, as a disagreement between two people, with their arguments. Section 3 holds two decisions, each with its timestamp. One open question on the budget is marked "not found".

Second prompt, in the same conversation:

From the same transcript, produce a five-column table: Action; Owner (name as it appears in the transcript); Due date; Timestamp; Status (decided, proposed, to be confirmed). If the owner or the due date is not stated explicitly, write "to be specified". End with a section "What I could not find" giving the question to ask to fill each gap.

A third prompt draws the 200-word follow-up email from those two answers. It carries a short subject line, then "In short", "Decisions" and "Actions and due dates". It ends with an invitation to flag any error within two days.

What changes: the disagreement stays a disagreement. Every decision can be found in the transcript at the stated time. And the gaps become questions for the next meeting.

3Build a doctored transcript and question it

Write a ten-minute fictional transcript yourself, in a Word document. One line per turn of speech, with the timestamp and the speaker name. Any topic will do, choosing a venue for an away day for instance. Slip in one decision taken, one decision postponed and one action with no due date. Optional variant, if you are running a real meeting: start transcription, then download the .docx from Recap, Transcript, Download.

Open the file, correct what needs correcting, then attach it to Copilot Chat. Here is the starting prompt, to be improved:

"Summarise this meeting and list the actions."

Add the file name and its description, the five-section structure, the "not found" instruction, the timestamp per decision and the length limit. The composer below guides you on the Sources and Verification fields.

Self-assessment grid: (a) the postponed decision appears as postponed, not as taken; (b) the action with no due date carries "to be specified"; (c) the timestamp of the decision taken does match the passage in your .docx.

Open the prompt composer