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Translate a meeting in real time with Interpreter

Run a cross-language Teams meeting without a human interpreter — the Interpreter agent translates speech live, in your own voice, so everyone follows along in the language they think in.

Stage: First-Party Agents · For: End user · Level: Starter · Time: 10 min

Status: Generally available — verify current availability on the Agents in Microsoft 365 roster.

When to use this

You're on a Teams call where not everyone shares a first language — a customer in São Paulo, a supplier in Tokyo, a teammate in Munich — and the meeting keeps stalling on "sorry, can you repeat that?" Interpreter is a prebuilt first-party agent that does real-time, speech-to-speech translation inside the meeting, so each person hears the conversation in their own language as it happens. You're not pasting text into a translator after the fact; the translation is the meeting.

This is the most visceral "an agent just did something a person used to do" moment in the whole roster — a great one to show a skeptic.

What you'll need

  • M365 Copilot license with access to the Interpreter agent in Teams
  • A Teams meeting with participants who speak different languages
  • A quick heads-up to attendees that the call will be interpreted (it's both courtesy and consent)

Try it now — the prompt

Interpreter is turned on from inside the meeting rather than typed at like a chat agent. Once it's running, you steer it in plain language:

(In a Teams meeting) @Interpreter translate between English and Spanish for this
call, and keep my translated voice matched to how I actually sound.

Why this works: it names the language pair explicitly (so the agent isn't guessing) and asks for voice matching, which is the feature that makes interpreted speech feel like you talking rather than a robotic overlay. Naming both removes the two things people most often fumble on their first try.

Step by step

  1. Start or join the Teams meeting and open the agent. Bring up Interpreter from the meeting's agents or Copilot surface — it runs in the call, not in a side chat.
  2. Set the language pair. Tell it which languages to bridge. Each participant experiences the call in their chosen language while everyone keeps speaking naturally.
  3. Talk normally — let it interpret. Speak in full thoughts and pause at natural breaks; the agent translates in near real time. Resist the urge to talk over it.
  4. Confirm understanding out loud: 
    Quick check — did that come through clearly on your end? Let me know if
anything got lost and I'll say it again.
    Treating interpretation as a shared tool, not a black box, is what keeps the meeting flowing.

Screenshots

We deliberately don't ship screenshots that go stale — the Microsoft Copilot UI changes often. Follow the numbered steps above, which we keep current. Maintainers can regenerate fresh captures with the Playwright tool in tooling/screenshots/.

Make it better

Interpretation gets better when you set the call up for it: - Brief participants first. A 10-second "this call will be interpreted, speak in full sentences and pause at the ends" makes the output dramatically cleaner. - Pair it with the recap. Let Facilitator capture decisions and action items so the content of the cross-language meeting is preserved, not just understood in the moment. - Use it for inclusion, not just translation. A teammate who's fluent-but-not-native often follows far more comfortably in their first language — offer it even when "everyone speaks English."

📚 Learn more. The Agents in Microsoft 365 hub describes Interpreter and the other prebuilt agents in plain language, and Nicole Herskowitz's (CVP, M365 Copilot) blog on enabling human-agent teams explains how these agents work alongside you.

Watch out for

  • Tell people they're being interpreted. It's courtesy, and in some places consent matters. Open with it rather than springing it mid-call.
  • It's an aid, not a legal record. For contracts, compliance, or high-stakes negotiation, a certified human interpreter still owns the room. Use the agent for working conversations.
  • Cross-talk breaks it. Real-time interpretation needs clean turns. The more people talk over each other, the more it drops — so chair the meeting a little more firmly than usual.

Where this leads (the ramp)

Once you've watched an agent handle a live, in-the-moment job inside a meeting, the jump to letting an agent run a multi-step task across your tools feels natural — not single-purpose help, but delegated work. That's Stage 3 · Cowork: describe an outcome and let Copilot pull the inputs, do the steps, and hand you the finished result.

Next: Cowork → Hand off an end-to-end task to Cowork

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