Microsoft Teams will continue censoring profanity in captions by default for some government users until the end of August, a month later than planned.

In 2023, Microsoft introduced a toggle controlling the profanity filter in Teams Live Captions. Enabled by default, the filter replaced naughty words with asterisks. It was a user-level preference rather than something controlled by the meeting organizer or tenant administrator.

Earlier this year, Microsoft had a change of heart and decided to disable the filter by default. "This change ensures captions more accurately reflect spoken content, supporting accessibility needs and aligning with regional regulatory requirements (including the EU)," the company wrote.

Ah yes, the ******* EU. Words uttered in more than one US tech company Teams call, we'd wager.

Users could, of course, turn the filter back on. The change applied to newly initialized users and those who had never configured the setting themselves. The upshot was that Live Captions might display what Microsoft delicately called "unfiltered language."

The filter demonstrated that Teams was doing more than simply turning speech into text, although users might reasonably wonder why censorship was the default.

In April, Microsoft added the change to its roadmap and targeted a June rollout. It has now reached general availability – unless, it appears, you're using Teams in certain government environments.

For Government Community Cloud (GCC), GCC High, and Department of Defense users, completion has slipped by a month, from the end of July to the end of August. A veil will therefore remain over swears in those environments by default for a little longer.

Far be it from us to wonder whether US government users might prefer to be spared foul-mouthed captions during calls with certain branches of the administration. We asked Microsoft for an explanation for the delay.

In the meantime, affected users have a few more weeks to wait before Live Captions confirms what they thought they heard on some of the spicier government calls. ®