No licence on either side
Translated captions in Teams need a Teams Premium or Copilot licence, either yours or the organiser’s. SubLive works on the meeting’s sound in the browser, so neither of you needs one.
Teams translator for meetings in the browser
Translation inside Microsoft Teams comes with licences: Teams Premium or Copilot for translated captions, Copilot for Interpreter. When nobody in the meeting has them, open it in Teams on the web, in Chrome, and SubLive shows what people say in your language in a window above the meeting.
Free minutes after you confirm your email. No card required.
What makes this case different
Where Interpreter stops
Microsoft does not support Interpreter in town halls, webinars or Microsoft Teams free, and guests cannot use it. For SubLive the question is only whether the meeting plays in a Chrome tab.
Names next to the words
Teams outlines the tile of whoever is speaking. In dialog mode, SubLive uses that to put the person’s name next to their words, on work accounts and on teams.live.com alike. The names are not saved anywhere.
How it works here
Open the meeting in Chrome
From the invite, choose Continue on this browser instead of the Teams app; Microsoft lists Edge and Chrome for joining this way. With a work account you can also sign in at teams.microsoft.com, and personal accounts use teams.live.com.
Choose the language you read
Common spoken languages are detected on their own. If the meeting is in a less common one, name it once before you start.
Start once you are in
Press start or Alt+Shift+S. Subtitles appear in a window you can keep over the Teams tab or above every window on the screen.
Example: a daily stand-up in an international team
Your team holds its stand-up on Teams in English. You work from Kyiv, English is your second language, and the company has no Teams Premium.
You keep the meeting in a Chrome tab instead of the desktop app and start SubLive with Ukrainian. Each update comes up in Ukrainian next to the colleague’s name, so when someone mentions a blocker that touches your part of the work, you catch it the first time.
What it will not do
- The Teams desktop and mobile apps are not heard. It has to be Teams on the web, in Chrome.
- Subtitles from speech run about a sentence behind, and your own voice is not translated for the others.
- The output is machine translation. Check numbers, dates and commitments before you act on them.
Before you use it at work
Some companies restrict which Chrome extensions their staff can install, and on a managed browser an administrator can block them. If your laptop is managed, check your company’s policy on third-party extensions before you rely on SubLive in Teams.
If you save a transcript of the meeting, ask the other participants whether they agree. Whether their consent is legally required depends on where you and they are; the Recording & Consent notice explains what SubLive does and what it leaves to you.
Questions people ask about this
- Can my IT department block it?
- Yes. On a managed Chrome, administrators can block or allow extensions from the Chrome Web Store, as Google’s Chrome Enterprise help describes. If SubLive will not install on a work laptop, ask IT.
- Can I use it in another company’s Teams meeting?
- Yes. Microsoft lets people without a Teams account join from the invite link in Edge or Chrome by choosing Continue on this browser. SubLive translates that tab the same way, whoever organised the meeting.
- Does it work in Teams town halls and webinars?
- If the event plays in a Chrome tab, yes, because SubLive translates what the tab plays. Microsoft does not support Interpreter there, and translated captions in a town hall are limited to the languages the organiser chose in advance.
- Does SubLive read the Teams chat?
- No. It listens to the meeting’s sound and, in dialog mode, reads the names on the video tiles. Chat messages, files and the participant list are left alone.
Useful for this
What Teams includes, what needs an add-on and how the options compare is covered in Microsoft Teams live translation: captions, Interpreter and a browser option.
How SubLive compares with meeting bots and built-in captions →
Other ways people use SubLive
SubLive is not affiliated with Google, Microsoft or Zoom.