Where Teams actually puts your recording
The storage location trips people up because it depends on the meeting. A recording from a scheduled or ad hoc meeting lands in the OneDrive of the person who pressed record, inside a Recordings folder. A recording from a channel meeting goes instead to that channel's SharePoint document library.
In both cases you want the downloaded video file rather than a link. Organisations frequently apply automatic expiry to these folders, sometimes deleting recordings after a set number of days, so downloading a copy of anything important is worth doing regardless of what you plan to do with it.
When a separate transcript is the better tool
Teams can produce its own live transcript, and where your licence and administrator allow it, that is a reasonable first stop. It has to be started during the call, which is exactly the thing people forget, and once a meeting is over there is no way to go back and turn it on retroactively.
A recording, by contrast, can be transcribed at any point afterwards. That covers the meeting nobody transcribed at the time, the archive of calls from before the feature was enabled, and any situation where you want the text as a file of your own rather than a panel inside the application.
Frequently asked questions
The recording expired before I downloaded it. Any options?
Check your organisation's retention settings with an administrator, since expired items sometimes sit recoverable for a period. Once genuinely deleted the recording is gone and there is nothing to transcribe.
Can I transcribe a channel meeting recording?
Yes. It is stored in the channel's SharePoint library rather than someone's OneDrive, so download it from there. The file itself is an ordinary video and uploads exactly like any other.
Is my company's meeting audio sent anywhere?
It is processed on our own hardware and never passed to a third-party AI service, then deleted the moment the transcript is ready. Only the transcript text is retained for you.