Microsoft Brings OpenAI Muscle to Teams Premium Release, Sinequa Launches Workplace Search, More News
A little over a week after announcing a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, Microsoft announced the integration of OpenAi's tools into Teams Premium in a move that could dramatically shake up the collaboration and video conferencing space.
The release of Premium was expected. What wasn't, was its use of OpenAI:
#MicrosoftTeams Premium v1 released today - OpenAI integration coming soon.https://t.co/q4fIfsuTzv pic.twitter.com/QBqZYiNCNT
— Jeff Teper (@jeffteper) February 1, 2023
The company announced its plans to release a premium version of Teams at last year's Ignite conference. At the time, the company stated the new premium model would be AI-driven and would make “every meeting from one-on-ones to large meetings, to virtual appointments to webinars more personalized, intelligent, and secure," according to Microsoft Teams VP Nicole Herskowitz. Few details were provided at the time on what specific form the AI would take.
Microsoft launched a 30-day trial of Teams Premium in December. That subscription model is now generally available to all businesses at an introductory price of $7 per month per user until June 30th, after which it will increase to a standard $10 per user per month pricing.
This week's announcement clears up any doubt about how AI will fit into Teams. One big draw is the introduction of Intelligent Recap to Teams Premium. The feature uses GPT 3.5 to create meeting notes, broken down into chapters to allow for quick overviews. The recap also provides personalized versions of the meeting, to highlight when your name was mentioned or a screen was shared, as well as noting when you joined or left a meeting for easy access to discussions you missed. The system also suggests action items based on the discussion personalized for every attendee.
The Teams Premium announcement covered a lot more ground, including the addition of its Enterprise Content Deliver Network (eCDN) to Teams Premium to improve the quality of live events. The new features will certainly give Premium the lift it needs to take off, even at the $10 per user price tag.
This is only the beginning of Microsoft’s journey with OpenAI. We have already looked at the possible implications of ChatGPT in Microsoft 365 and the likely integration into Bing.
Cisco Gets Cozy With Teams Too
That wasn't the only announcement around Microsoft Teams this week. At the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2023 event, Cisco announced it was making a number of its collaboration devices compatible with Teams.
The company made the announcement during the event as well as unveiled the new Cisco Table Microphone Pro, a digital and multi-directional table microphone for hybrid workspaces, along with audio interoperability advancements.
The Cisco Board Pro 55 and 75, Cisco Room Bar, Cisco Room Kit Pro, Cisco Room Kit EQ, Cisco Room Navigator and Cisco Desk will all now work with Teams. Although none of these are new devices, they will now come with Teams certification.
The announcement has been in the works for a few months now. In October, the two companies announced a partnership to bring Teams Rooms together with a number of Cisco devices. The partnership was specifically designed to meet the challenges created by hybrid meetings.
At the time, Cisco specifically mentioned Frames, which keeps in-room participants front-and-center for remote attendees. It uses AI to understand the context of the room and the meeting to show the best possible view of in-room participants for all attendees.
The company launched these capabilities in beta in October and general availability is expected in March.
Cisco claims to be the first to offer devices with Microsoft Teams Rooms as the default experience, along with support to join WebEx meetings without rebooting or reconfiguration by IT.
Meanwhile, the new Cisco Table Microphone Pro will allow multiple meeting room participants to be heard equally, regardless of their distance from the device or the level of background noise. Cisco is also working with other third-party vendors to enable similar functionality across its audio systems.
Sinequa Workplace Search Debuts
Moving on to the world of enterprise search, Paris-based Sinequa introduced a new search cloud service named Workplace Search to find content and data in any business application. With it, the company states, organizations can offer their employees a unified search experience that makes finding knowledge and expertise in the digital workplace easy.
Learning Opportunities
Enterprise search has long been a challenge in the workplace, exacerbated by the 367 different software tools used on average within an organization. The resulting data silos and disruptions to processes result in time wasted searching for information, according to a recent study by Forrester.
Sinequa Workplace Search provides a single point of entry to connect employees with all content sources and business applications, in an effort to make it faster and easier to access company knowledge and expertise.
The solution provides a personalized search experience to employees underpinned by natural language processing (NLP) and understanding (NLU), as well as Sinequa’s latest advancements in neural search. Other additions include:
- The ability to view documents in their original format directly within the search results.
- The new Presentation Builder, for locating individual slides within a presentation.
- Dynamic filters, to help narrow search results based on attributes such as content source, type or concept.
- The ability to integrate Workplace Search into collaboration tools like Teams.
Sinequa was founded in 2002 and has raised $28.3 million in funding to date, according to Crunchbase.
Netscout Research Points to Growing UCC Market
Research from Westford, Mass.-based Netscout found that a majority of surveyed organizations plan to invest more in UCC (Unified Communications and Collaboration) tools and platforms over the next year.
According to the survey of 300 IT decision makers (registration required) at organizations with over $1 billion in revenue, over two thirds (69%) plan to increase the number of UCC tools in their workplace. Seventy-five percent are also expected to support more platforms in the coming months.
The top reason for adopting these tools, according to the report, was to support employee collaboration (67%). A clear majority (89%) said they wanted to invest to take advantage of new features and functions. The number of respondents that said these tools are critical to the performance of their digital workplace increased by 20% (60% as opposed to 40% last year). A majority (60%) of respondents said collaboration platforms, applications and tools are critical to their organization’s current work environment, compared with 49% last year.
Ziflow Raises $20M
Finally, this week, London-based Ziflow, which develops a workflow platform for centralizing feedback on creative assets, announced the conclusion of a $20 million Series A funding round.
According to a statement from the company, this brings its total funding to date to $27 million.
The Ziflow platform lets stakeholders review any type of content in a collaborative environment that can be tailored to a team's creative process. The company claims that by automating creative workflow, organizations can reduce the time spent delivering projects by up to one day per week on average.
The company will use the investment to expand its global sales capabilities as well as developing product that will improve its workflow capabilities and reach.
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About the Author
David is a full-time journalist based in Ireland. A partisan of ‘green’ living and conservation, he is particularly interested in information management and how enterprise content management, analytics, big data and cloud computing impact on it.
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