Enable Teams Meeting Copilot without recording/transcription

I've been lucky enough to have Teams Meeting Copilot for a while now. I use it all the time during meetings.

But sometimes, I'll realize about 20 minutes into a meeting, when I want to start chatting with Copilot, that I forgot to kick off a recording or transcription. Sure, I can enable it from that point forward, but most likely I've lost my shot at getting that question answered (and I'll also have an incomplete meeting summary and collection of action items).

Now, this feature is available:

Use Copilot without recording a Teams meeting - Microsoft Support

If you don’t want to record or transcribe confidential meetings in Teams, you can still engage with Copilot. Here’s how.

Microsoft Support

Now I can get the benefit of Copilot in more meetings

This feature was announced at Ignite a few months ago, and I've been excitedly waiting for it. Finally, it's here!

There are a few things to know:

• The option needs to be enabled before the meeting starts. This is something the Meeting Organizer needs to do.
• This needs to be enabled for each individual meeting. As far as I've seen there's not a way to default this on (I wish there was).
• Meeting Copilot features only work during the meeting. So there's no ability to do a recap post-meeting or ask questions after the meeting concludes. This makes sense, given that there's no saved transcript.

That second point is a bit of a hassle but is one that I see as a good payback. 1-minute of effort is effectively the cost of my insurance policy against my own forgetfulness to start a transcription/recording, so that I can leverage Meeting Copilot. Worth it.

There's no negative impact on regular Teams Meeting Copilot features. If we start formally transcribing the meeting, I'll still get the benefit of things like Recap and being able to interact with Copilot after the meeting.