What you need to know
- Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Teams Premium.
- The company outlined in an extensive blog post all the new features available, and many are coming in the second quarter of 2023.
- ‘Intelligent recap’ will automatically generate meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights to help you get the most critical information, even if you miss the meeting.
- Microsoft Teams Premium also features AI-powered live translation (for captions).
Microsoft is going all in on AI and Microsoft Teams Premium. Today the company released a massive blog (opens in new tab) detailing all the new features available and several coming in the next few months, many of which rely on OpenAI and its GPT-3.5 (“Generative pre-trained transformer”) technology.
Perhaps the most significant new feature is one we saw demoed years ago at Microsoft Build. AI will summarize your meetings in a digestible and coherent format for reference or for those who missed the meeting.
As Microsoft remarks:
“With intelligent recap in Teams premium, you’ll get automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights to help you get the information most important to you, even if you miss the meeting.”
“With intelligent recap, you can now save time spent reviewing meeting recordings. AI-generated chapters divide the meeting into sections so it’s easy to pick and choose the content most relevant to you. This is available today for PowerPoint Live meeting recordings. Intelligent recap will automatically generate meeting chapters based on the meeting transcript as well.”
“In addition, there may be particular points in a meeting that you want to revisit. Available today, personalized timeline markers—that only you can see—call out when you joined or left a meeting in the meeting recording, so you can quickly click and listen in on what you missed. Personalized timeline markers will expand to include when your name was mentioned and when a screen was shared.”
Microsoft also highlighted a feature that is already available: Live translations. With Microsoft Teams Premium, users get “… AI-powered real-time translations from 40 spoken languages. Meeting participants can read captions in their own language, saving money and making meetings more productive and effortless. Only the meeting organizer needs to have Teams Premium for all meeting attendees to enjoy live translations.”
It should be no surprise that Microsoft is going hard on AI. The technologies have been teased for years, but with the recent release of ChatGPT-3.5 by OpenAI, it seems “AI” has gone from buzzword to reality very quickly. Microsoft is a prominent investor in OpenAI, with $1 billion given in the past and a possible $10 billion paycheck headed its way.
Just today, it was reported that Microsoft is building GPT-4 features into Microsoft Bing and that this infusion could happen in the “coming weeks.” Not much is known about GPT-4, but Semafor, who broke the news, noted from its sources that it “responds much faster than the current version, and the replies sound more human and are more detailed.”
Microsoft is also reportedly making a lot of advances in AI due to its supercomputer, announced in 2020 (opens in new tab), which OpenAI is leveraging to train data sets. Currently, while ChatGPT-3 is engaging with its results and accuracy, its speed can be slow, which GPT-4 reportedly addresses.
Previous reporting also said Microsoft is putting AI into Office. In related news, Microsoft is facing an EU anti-trust complaint and probe brought by rival Slack.
