Hi All,
one of the new feature of Microsoft Teams is the CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) integration into meetings (announcement here What’s New in Microsoft Teams | November 2021).
How to enable the CART feature
You can easily enable the new CART feature in the Meeting Options window
Flag the “Provide CART Captions” option
This will generate a CART API Link for that meeting
You can do the same during the meeting within Meeting options sidebar
How to test the CART API Link
The CART API Link provided is something like this one
https://api.captions.office.microsoft.com/cartcaption?meetingid=%7b%22tId%22%3a%227d07b2d2-2140-4db3-b522-6bb5a191f7f4%22%2c%22oId%22%3a%2295855f77-907a-4051-b2eb-5d4fc54106d2%22%2c%22thId%22%3a%2219%3ameeting_MTAyMTZeNaAeNDh1NS11NzIzLWJmMjUtZTZjZGJmYWU9NzMx%40thread.v2%22%2c%22mId%22%3a%220%22%7d&token=oajdsb9
There are many different CART services with different prices and features, but at this step I want to test the new feature, so I found this one that is completely free https://webcaptioner.com/
This service rely on AI generated Captions (so it’s basically similar to Teams native AI generated Captions), but it’s allow to send the Captions to an external service via API, so I click on Start Captioning!
The page present a three (vertical) dots in the lower corner, so I could I avoid to click on that? 😉
than click on Settings
go to Channels and select a zoom channel
Paste the Microsoft Teams CART API Link into the API Token field than click Add Channel
Go to the Language menu and select the PROVIDED Language by this CART Service
To test the CART Service we have to turn on live captions into the Teams Meeting
In the lower right corner of the meeting window you will find the three dots menu for Captioning, where you can choose the spoken language and which captions use, AI generated or from CART service.
It’s important to choose the right spoken language and set it identical to the CART Service, otherwise nothing will be displayed
The language change is not immediate, you can wait or speed up the process turning off and on again the live captioning in Teams meeting.
When the language is updated, reflecting the language from the CART, the CART generated captions will start to flow under the meeting!
It’s also important to understand that, at this moment, the spoken language is a meeting-wide setting, it will affect the live capiton and trascription, and is set for evey meeting partecipants
Consideration
A real CART service is a Speech to Text service operated by humans and not by software, this will results in a better transcription. I’m glad that Microsoft added this feature to Teams.
What I hope will be improved is the ability to choose between more than one CART streams and multiple languages, to not only read the tascription but also the translation of what is said
As always, I hope this article will help some of you!
Luca Vitali [MVP] 
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