The Microsoft Teams recording bot

What the recording bot is

The Microsoft Teams recording bot is a Microsoft Graph Communications recording application— a certified recording app that Microsoft's platform allows to join Teams calls and capture their media. Technically it is a .NET Windows service that participates in a call the same way a person or a meeting device does, receives the audio streams, and writes them to storage. Microsoft supplies the compliance recording framework and the interface for a certified application to attach to calls; the bot is the application that does the actual recording.

Crucially, the bot is not a piece of software your users install or a plug-in bolted into the Teams client. It runs on a dedicated managed serverthat we provision, host in the US, and operate for your organization alone. From the user's point of view, nothing about Teams changes — they make and receive calls exactly as before, while the bot joins in the background according to the rules you have configured. Because it lives on your own single-tenant server, your recordings are never processed alongside another organization's data.

What makes the bot flexible is that it does not rely on a single trigger to get onto a call. It supports four distinct join methods, each suited to a different scenario, and they can be used together in one deployment.

Four ways the bot joins a call

Different conversations reach the bot in different ways. Some should be recorded automatically for every in-scope person; others are scheduled in advance; others are one-off sessions you add the bot to on demand. The four join methods below map onto those realities, and you can mix them to cover your whole environment.

1. Compliance policy (automatic)

This is the primary method for regulated recording. An administrator assigns a compliance recording policyin Microsoft 365 to the users who fall in scope. From that moment, every call those users make or receive triggers the bot to join automatically — there is no button to press and no way for the user to opt out. Because it joins under Microsoft's compliance framework, the Teams recording banner is shown to participants, and the coverage is enforced organizationally rather than left to individual discretion.

When to use it:for any population that must be recorded as a matter of policy — traders, advisers, brokers, clinicians, or support agents whose calls are subject to HIPAA, FINRA, SEC 17a-4, Dodd-Frank, or MiFID II obligations. If "record everyone in this group, always" is the requirement, compliance policy is the method.

2. Manual join (API, on demand)

The bot can also be added to a specific call or meeting on demand, through its API, without a standing policy. You invoke it for the session you want recorded and it joins that call as a participant, records it, and transcribes it like any other capture.

When to use it: for one-off recorded sessions — a board meeting, a negotiation, an investigation interview, or a client call outside your normal policy scope — where you want a deliberate, on-demand recording rather than blanket coverage.

3. Calendar auto-join (scheduled meetings)

Calendar auto-join lets the bot monitor Exchange Online calendars for a defined group of users or resources and automatically join their scheduled Teams meetings when they start. It watches the relevant calendars, sees an upcoming meeting, and attaches to it at the scheduled time — no policy assignment and no manual trigger required.

When to use it:when the meetings you need to capture are booked in advance and you want reliable coverage of a specific group's calendar — recurring committee meetings, scheduled advisory sessions, or any team whose meeting cadence lives in Outlook.

4. Direct calls (1:1)

The bot also captures direct 1:1 calls to and from in-scope users — the person-to-person calls that happen between meetings and are easy to miss with a meeting-focused tool. Direct calls are recorded and transcribed the same way as any other session, so nothing slips through the gaps.

When to use it: whenever spontaneous person-to-person conversations carry regulatory weight — a quick advisory call, a trade instruction, or a support call that never appears on a calendar. Combined with the compliance policy method, direct-call capture closes the gap between formal meetings and everyday calling. You can see how these methods fit into the wider workflow on the how it works page.

What every method captures

No matter which of the four methods gets the bot onto a call, what it captures is the same. Every joined call is both recorded and transcribed— there is no "lightweight" join method that skips part of the pipeline.

For audio, each recording produces a combined recording of the whole call and per-participant (unmixed) audio, with each speaker on their own track. That separation is what makes attribution reliable: even on a busy multi-party call, you can tell exactly who said what, because the voices were never mixed down into a single indistinguishable stream in the first place.

Each recording is then transcribed automatically, producing a searchable, speaker-labelled transcript alongside the audio. So whether the bot joined via a compliance policy, a manual API call, calendar monitoring, or a direct call, the output is a consistent, auditable pair of audio and text. There is more detail on the transcription pipeline on the transcription page, and on always-on capture on the automatic recording page.

Recording transparency

Recording people's conversations carries obligations, and the bot is built to support transparency rather than work against it. When the bot joins under a compliance recording policy, Microsoft Teams displays its standard recording notification banner to participants, so the session is visibly on the record. This banner behavior is part of Microsoft's compliance recording framework, described in the Microsoft Graph communications compliance recording documentation.

That said, consent and notification requirements vary by jurisdiction, and they are your organization's responsibility to define and honor. Some regions require all-party consent; others do not. The service gives you a transparent, banner-backed recording mechanism, but it does not decide your consent policy for you. We help you configure the service appropriately, and you own the legal decision about who must be notified and how. For more on how we protect the recordings once they are captured, see the security page.

A managed bot, not software to install

The recording bot is delivered as a fully managed service, not a product you download and maintain. We host it, run it, monitor it, and patch it on a dedicated, single-tenant server provisioned for your organization. There is no bot infrastructure for your team to stand up, no Windows service for your admins to keep alive, and nothing for your users to install on their machines.

That model matters for both operations and compliance. Operationally, keeping a Graph recording application healthy — handling Microsoft platform updates, certificate rotation, and capacity — is real work, and we carry it. From a compliance standpoint, the dedicated server means your recordings, transcripts, and configuration stay isolated on infrastructure that is yours alone. Learn what the managed model includes on the managed service overview, and how the environment is secured on the security page.

Frequently asked questions