Audio-Only Recording to Protect User Privacy During Recording Playback

In 2023, mesh avatars were the focus for helping people who didn’t like to appear with their video turned on in Teams meetings. To some, it seemed utterly cool to be able to hand over their visual online presence to an avatar that they created with care to be broadly similar to their real self. Avatars are dumb (your voice remains your voice), but they can express some visual reactions to what happened during meetings.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released the ability to create a mesh avatar from a photo in an attempt to make the avatars more realistic. Figure 1 shows the avatar I created from my photo. My efforts didn’t create a very realistic digital presence.

The Avatars for Teams service plan is included with many Microsoft 365 and Office 365 products, so most the Teams installed base of 320 million monthly active users can use avatars. According to the Teams Avatar app, 83.8K people installed the app to create or update their avatars in the last month, so interest remains in having a way to attend meetings in a visual sense without projecting our real self, flawed and imperfect as that might be.

Audio-Only Recording for Teams Meetings

Which brings us neatly to the news announced in Microsoft 365 message notification MC1173926 (16 October 2025) that the Teams meeting recording feature will soon be able to create an audio-only recording. Deployment of the feature to make it generally available has started and should be complete in late November 2025.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft says that making an audio-only recording for a meeting offers “a more comfortable and convenient recording experience.” Microsoft goes on to note that audio-only recording “alleviates concerns about facial information exposure when recording is necessary, offering a more privacy-conscious approach to recording meetings.”

I thought avatars were all about making the visual side of meetings more comfortable for users. However, it’s important to remember that using avatars is a personal choice to customize the video feed for people who opt to use avatars. Audio-only recording is a meeting option to suppress the video feed that flows into the meeting recording for all users, no matter whether they use Teams desktop, browser, or mobile clients. Participants can have their cameras turned on during meetings, but only the audio feeds will make it into the .MP4 file created in the meeting organizer’s OneDrive for Business account.

Suppressing the video feed for the recording means that anyone who plays the recording afterwards cannot see how the participants appeared during the meeting, including if any avatars are used. All the playback can deliver is the audio stream. This is what Microsoft means when they refer to a more privacy-conscious approach. It seems reasonable to say that if you’re not in a meeting, privacy of the participants is better respected if you cannot see how people appeared during the meeting.

The ability to generate a meeting transcript depends on the audio feed, so suppressing the video feed has no impact on the transcript.

No Administrative Controls

There doesn’t seem to be any administrative control in the Teams meeting policy for an organization to decide that audio-only recording is the default or only option for Teams meetings. Microsoft says that administrator intervention is unnecessary because audio-only recording “integrates into existing workflows.” In other words, “Audio only” is an option in a drop-down menu for an organizer to decide what to record for a meeting (Figure 2).

See the Microsoft documentation for more information about recordings for Teams meetings.

Little Value in the Video Stream in Recordings

It took me a little while to work out why Microsoft wanted to introduce audio-only recordings for Teams meetings. After thinking things through, I think this is a good idea. Few of us really want our visual appearance to be replayed in recordings, and it’s uncertain if the video stream adds much value to those who listen to recordings after an event. The transcript is a much more valuable artifact, especially if Microsoft 365 Copilot can reason over it to produce a summary and action items.

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