team
Google Meet has a transcription feature that works well, produces a Google Doc in Drive, and is switched on by default. It also has a device restriction, a language list shorter than most people expect, an edition list that does not match the one for recording, and a folder structure that changed in July 2026. Teams usually discover these one at a time, in the middle of a call they needed a record of.
What follows is the shape of the feature as it currently stands, including the places where the documentation for recording and the documentation for transcripts quietly disagree.
Meet has two ways of turning speech into text, and only one of them leaves a file behind.
Live captions are available to all users, including personal accounts, and cover a long list of languages, though many are marked beta. They are turned on per person, they are not shared, and there is no way to save them. Captions are an accessibility layer for the duration of the call.
Transcripts are a Workspace feature. They produce a document in Drive, they are visible to the whole meeting while running, and they are listed as available on these editions:
The edition list for recording is not identical. Recording is also available on Essentials, Enterprise Essentials, and to Google One subscribers with 2 TB or more of storage. None of those three appear on the transcripts list. An account can therefore be able to record a meeting and still have no transcription option, which explains a good share of the confusion in support threads.
There is a hardware restriction as well. Transcripts can be used on a computer, laptop or Android device. An iPhone or iPad cannot start one. For a team whose default meeting device is a phone, that single line decides the workflow.
| Live captions | Transcripts | Recording | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who gets it | All users | Eight Workspace editions | Wider edition list, includes Google One 2 TB |
| Produces a file | No | Google Doc in Drive | Video file in Drive |
| Devices | Computer and mobile | Computer, laptop, Android | Computer |
| Includes chat messages | No | No | Yes |
| Visible to others | No, per person | Yes, an icon shows for everyone | Yes |
Meeting transcripts are on by default for all Workspace editions, with one exception: Google Workspace for Education accounts with a student license, where they are off by default.
Starting one takes three clicks. Join or start the meeting, click Meeting tools at the bottom right, then Transcribe, then Start transcription in the pop-up. Once it runs, a Transcripts icon appears at the top right for everyone in the meeting, so this is not a quiet capture.
Who can press the button depends on one admin setting. If Host management is off, anyone from the host's domain can turn Transcripts on. If it is on, only the host and co-hosts can. That is worth checking before a call where the person expected to take the record is a guest from another company, because they will not be able to start it themselves.
Stopping is the same path in reverse: Meeting tools, Transcribing, Stop transcription, then Stop in the pop-up. Three behaviours follow from how Google implemented this:
That last point is the one that surprises people. A meeting where somebody stopped transcription for a confidential five minutes and restarted afterwards produces two files, not one document with a gap in it.
Administrators can also require explicit consent from every participant before features like Transcribe, Record, and take notes for me are used. The setting is off by default. Where it has been turned on, participants see a prompt and click Start, Join or Continue, and anyone who declines has the option to leave the meeting instead.
Transcripts are saved in the meeting organizer's Google Drive, in a folder named Google Meet, with a sub-folder created for each meeting. Since July 2026, an existing Meet Recordings folder containing older transcripts is automatically renamed Legacy Meet Recordings and moved inside the new Google Meet folder. Old transcripts stay available at the new location.
Storage matters more than it looks. A transcript can only be recorded if there is enough space in both the Workspace organization's Drive and the meeting host's Drive. A host who is personally out of quota will find transcription failing on a call that everybody else assumed was being captured.
Distribution is automatic and slightly narrow. After the meeting ends, an email with a link to the transcript is sent to the host, any co-hosts, and the person who turned Transcripts on. The transcript is also attached to the meeting's Google Calendar event, where all invitees inside the host's organization can open the attachment. If there are more than 200 invitees from the host's organization, the attachment is restricted to the host, co-hosts and whoever started the transcription.
Longer meetings take longer to process, so the absence of an email immediately after a two hour call is normal rather than a failure.
One consequence of the ownership model is worth planning around. Because the file lives in the organizer's Drive, a transcript belongs to a person rather than to the team, and it leaves with them. When that person changes roles or leaves the company, the meeting record goes into the usual offboarding queue along with everything else in their Drive. Copying anything that matters into a shared drive, or into the place where the work is tracked, is the only reliable answer to that.
Only spoken words appear in a transcript. Chat messages are not included, and the documented workaround is to record the meeting, since a recording captures chat. Any team that makes decisions by pasting links into the chat panel is therefore capturing half of the meeting and none of the evidence.
Meeting transcripts are available in eight languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Captions cover far more, which means a call can be perfectly legible on screen and produce nothing at all in Drive. For a team working in Dutch, Polish or Hindi, this is the end of the road for the built-in feature, and the reason third party tools have a market here at all.
Teams working across languages often reach for translated captions and assume the transcript will follow. It does not. Translated captions translate the live text to or from a long list of languages, and they are available on Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Google AI Pro for Education, and Enterprise Starter, which Google lists as available until June 30, 2025. Google has also stated that AI features are being added directly to Workspace Business and Enterprise plans, and that customers on Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus can continue to use translated captions through their existing subscriptions.
What this means in a bilingual meeting is that everyone can read along in their own language while the call happens, and the saved transcript still has to be one of the eight supported transcript languages. There is one more detail worth knowing if the meeting is being recorded: in the caption settings there is a Record captions option that embeds captions into the clip, which is the only way to carry the translated text into the artefact rather than losing it when the call ends.
The most useful setting is the one that removes the human step. When creating a meeting in Calendar, click Video call options, then Meeting records, then select Transcribe the meeting. Recording and take notes for me can be scheduled the same way.
Two caveats come with it. These features do not start until the host or a co-host joins the meeting on the web, so a host who dials in from a phone gets nothing. And participants joining a meeting with these features pre-enabled see an on-screen warning message, which is the correct behaviour but occasionally an awkward one on a first client call.
For a recurring internal meeting, scheduling transcription once on the series is the difference between a record that exists every week and a record that exists when somebody remembers. The feature set that a team actually uses is almost always the one that runs without a decision being made each time.
A finished transcript is a long Doc in somebody's Drive, correctly attributed and reasonably accurate, containing four sentences that matter and about nine thousand words that do not.
Drive search will find it, eventually, if the person searching remembers a distinctive phrase and which quarter the meeting happened in. That is a worse retrieval system than it sounds, and it is why so many teams have a folder full of transcripts and no shared idea of what was decided.
Part of the problem is that a transcript has no structure. A Doc that opens with two minutes of people joining and apologising for their connection looks the same, to a search index and to a colleague, as a Doc containing a budget approval. Nothing in the file marks the moment where the meeting changed direction. Google's take notes for me feature exists precisely because of this gap, and it helps, but a summary is still a document about a meeting rather than a thing anyone is accountable for.
The fix is not a better transcript. It is a short, deliberate step at the end of the meeting where the decisions and the owners leave the transcript and go somewhere they can be acted on. Three lines are usually enough: what was decided, who owns the next step, and when it is due. Put those on a board or in a task list and the transcript becomes what it should have been all along, which is the archive you consult when somebody disputes the detail.
That step can also be automated. Pasting a transcript into an assistant and asking it to create the tasks is a two minute operation when the task tool can be driven directly from ChatGPT or Claude, and the output is cards with owners and dates rather than paragraphs. The assistant is doing the reading nobody was going to do.
Check two things before the next meeting: whether the edition in use is on the transcripts list rather than only the recording list, and whether the host has Drive space. Then schedule transcription on one recurring meeting from the Calendar event so it stops depending on memory, and give the decisions a home outside Drive, such as a board the whole team can open. The transcript is the evidence. The board is the record.
No. Live captions are available to all users, but transcripts are limited to specific Workspace editions, including Business Standard, Business Plus, the Enterprise tiers, Education Plus, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and Workspace Individual. A free consumer account gets captions on screen and no file.
In the meeting organizer's Google Drive, inside a folder named Google Meet, with a sub-folder for each meeting. Older transcripts that were in the Meet Recordings folder were renamed Legacy Meet Recordings and moved inside that folder from July 2026.
Transcripts contain only spoken words. To keep chat messages from a meeting, the meeting has to be recorded, since the recording captures the chat as well.
No. Transcripts can be used on a computer, laptop or Android device. Scheduling transcription in advance from the Calendar event is the practical workaround, but the host or a co-host still has to join from the web for it to start.
Eight: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Live captions support many more languages, so captions may work in a meeting where no transcript can be produced.