Microsoft has announced a series of updates to its Copilot AI assistant in Teams, aimed at enhancing collaboration and improving the hybrid meeting experience. These new features promise to save users time and boost productivity across various aspects of their work.
Starting in May, Copilot in meetings will provide information and insights from both the meeting chat and transcript. This means users will have a more holistic view of what was covered in the meeting, whether it was spoken or written.
In addition, the Copilot in Teams chat compose box, available from April, will allow users to adjust their messages and provide custom rewritten versions. For instance, Copilot can add a call to action to your message or even rewrite it in a pirate's lingo. Soon, users will also be able to generate a new message with a prompt by typing just a few words in Teams chat, saving time and effort.
Intelligent call recap, another upcoming feature, will provide AI-powered insights and recaps of VoIP and Public Switched Telephone Network calls in Teams. This feature will be generally available in June with Teams Premium and Copilot.
Hybrid meetings are also set to improve with Microsoft IntelliFrame. This feature uses Cloud AI to identify and capture individual video feeds of each in-room participant, making it easier for remote attendees to see who is in the room. IntelliFrame will be turned on by default on Teams Rooms devices, ensuring meeting spaces are ready for hybrid work.
Furthermore, automatic camera switching for IntelliFrame will be available later this year. This capability uses AI to determine and select the optimized view of each person in a meeting room, ensuring that every remote participant knows who is in the room at all times.
Speaker recognition capabilities for any existing microphone will also improve transcript accuracy and Copilot provided meeting insights for Teams Rooms on Windows environments. When you join a meeting from a Teams Room, what you say in the meeting is isolated and attributed to you in the transcript, simply by enrolling your voice and face profiles.
Voice isolation, another AI-based feature, will ensure that only your voice is heard when you join a call or meeting in a noisy location. Once you complete a short enrollment process, this advanced noise suppression feature will isolate your voice and eliminate all other background noise, including other people's voices.
Microsoft is also expanding its Teams Phone and customer-facing role capabilities. As of April 1, 2024, the company is updating its Teams Phone financially-backed service level agreement to 99.999% uptime. Several new partners, including AT&T, Odido, Virgin Media O2, and Vodafone UK, will begin offering Teams Phone Mobile later this year.
The new Queues app, which currently in private preview and set to be generally available in June with Teams Premium, creates a workspace for both supervisors and employees engaging with customer calls. Additionally, an enhancement to Copilot for Service will soon allow agents to chat with Copilot during a meeting and ask questions over cases and contacts, summarize cases, reason over knowledge, and more.
Ultimatey, Microsoft's vision with Copilot is to bring the power of generative AI to everyone. All these updates are part of the company's ongoing efforts to build a foundation for the future, with a strong focus on the core fundamentals of Teams, including performance, reliability, and ease of use.