Microsoft Aims to Improve Meetings With Latest Teams Updates

Microsoft announced a series of updates for Microsoft Teams on March 26, aimed at improving hybrid meetings and increasing Copilot’s capabilities within the collaboration platform. 

Improving Team Collaboration with Copilot Enhancements

Microsoft Teams VP Nicole Herskowitz explained in a blog post the updates were a result of customer feedback. The Copilot additions improve existing capabilities in Teams to now include:

• Meeting summaries and information derived from both written and oral communications during a meeting; available in May.
• Message editing or custom rewrites from within the Teams chat compose box — the blog post boasts it can “make you sound like a pirate”; available in April.
• Generate a new message with a prompt by typing just a few words in teams chat; available later this year
• Receive AI-powered insights and recaps of your voice over IP (VoIP) and Public Switched Telephone Network calls in Teams using Intelligent call recap; available in June with Teams Premium and Copilot.

While each release on its own is small, it shows the company continuing to iterate on its Copilot presence in Teams as it better understands how customers are using the AI assistant. During its recent hardware release event, Jeff Teper, president, Microsoft collaboration apps and platforms claimed that Copilot users saved 10 hours a month in productivity gains on average. As the software gets further integrated and upgraded throughout the system, hopefully the company will share more concrete numbers on where and how these productivity gains are reached.

Microsoft’s Supporting Features for the Hybrid Work Environment

The announcement also included enhancements to improve hybrid meetings, a continued challenge in the hybrid workplace. The new Microsoft IntelliFrame, a cloud-AI based application, identifies and isolates the individual video feeds of each in-room participant on a hybrid call. Intelliframe is set to work automatically on Teams Rooms devices, giving remote  meeting attendees the chance to better their collocated teammates  more clearly.

Additionally, automatic camera switching for IntelliFrame will become available later in the year. This AI-enabled capability determines and selects the optimized view of each person in attendance in a meeting room. This feature compares video sources such as laptops and room cameras to ensure best visibility for remote participants.

Further upgraded features include:

• Speaker recognition is coming to Teams Rooms on Window to automatically attribute speech to individuals who have enrolled their voice and face profiles; available in preview in April 
• Shared display is now available through Microsoft’s bring-your-own device (BYOD). This feature ensures full-control of the content shared to a display.
• Support for intelligent speakers in BYOD spaces, available for public preview this year. This will allow in-person meeting participants to attribute speech to individual attendees.
• BYOD IT management coming for admins; available in April 
• Voice isolation to eliminate background noise and amplify the speaker's voice; available April.

The announcement included further updates for Teams phone including new mobile carrier partnerships, improvements to uptime and further enhancements aimed at contact center employees.

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