Microsoft Teams is a professional tool, for professional people. So it makes perfect sense that a new update brings a profanity filter to Microsoft Teams that aims to keep everyone's language boardroom appropriate.
So if colorful language isn’t your thing, then you can now enjoy a more sanitized, family-friendly version of Jen from accounting giving Greg the what-for over those poorly filled-out K-12 forms.
A better captioning experience
Microsoft Teams' profanity filter is part of a wider update to the app's Live Captions and Live Transcription tools. The update allows for the positioning of captions to be customized in meetings with clearer speaker attribution, more space for captions to populate, and the ability to change font color and font size for easier reading.
Users will also now also be able to specify the current spoken language in meetings, and those with a Teams Premium license will be able to specify a desired captioning language for live translations.
Watch your language (or don't)
Sadly, the new update won’t bleep out spoken cursing during a call like on live TV or radio, but it will censor them from appearing in Live Captions and Live Transcription. You may have already noticed this in effect if you’re a regular Teams user, as the setting will be enabled by default.
Thankfully, if you’d rather not have messages filtered then you can choose not to by simply disabling the option to filter profane words in meeting captions from the captions and transcriptions tab under user settings. This is a user-level preference, so only you get to control when words are or aren’t filtered.
Outlook
Beyond having a much less sweary chat transcript for people to enjoy, this update to Microsoft Teams is a fantastic accessibility update that improves the experience for hearing and visually impaired members of a meeting.
All-in-all, this is a win for the virtual workplace and those within it. While small in scale, Microsoft Teams’ update is likely to be big in impact – and for that, all we can say is well ******* done.
