From breaking down language barriers to a new product range designed for the hybrid working era, here are extracts from popular news stories this week.
Microsoft Breaks Down Language Barriers in Teams Meetings
Microsoft has confirmed that language interpretation is generally available for Teams meeting participants.
The feature will allow professional interpreters to translate the speaker’s message into another language without disrupting the original speaker’s flow or delivery.
The company has designed the feature to support its customers who must communicate with users worldwide.
Shalendra Chhabra, Principal PM Manager in Microsoft Teams Meetings,” commented: “Here at Microsoft, we serve a diverse set of global customers, including governmental institutions that hold parliament meetings in multiple languages, multinational and multilingual corporations, businesses that work with vendors around the world, and “many more.
“This feature was built to support customers and users who need to communicate in the virtual world across languages.
"Our language interpretation feature will allow professional interpreters to convert the speaker’s message into another language without disrupting the speaker’s original flow or delivery."
Microsoft states that the simultaneous interpretation will allow for more inclusive meetings and allow all participants to collaborate fully, despite language barriers.
Zoom Launches ‘Survivability’ Offering to Combat Outages
Zoom has launched a hybrid survivability solution for Zoom Phone to enable businesses to continue providing core phone features during an outage.
The company states that the Zoom Phone Local Survivability (ZPLS) module is designed with large companies in mind.
The solution ensures that organisations can minimise revenue loss, maintain internal communications, and establish on-site safety if the Zoom Client cannot access a Zoom Phone data centre.
It means that in the event of an outage, Zoom clients who have ZPLS enabled will have continuous access to core phone functionalities such as making and receiving both internal and external calls.
ZPLS works with an on-site, small-scale server which provides failover capability and an additional layer of protection to the solution.
Teams Adds Apps to Calls Amid Hacking Concerns
Microsoft Teams is adding a number of Meetings features to its VoIP calls at a time the security of video conferencing platforms has been thrown into question.
According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, tabs, bots, in-meeting dialogues, and meeting stages will be available in Teams VoIP calls. All the functionalities of a Teams Meeting can be enjoyed in Teams VoIP Calls.
The meetings and calls may not be so enjoyable, however, if you are having to worry about being hacked through the unusual means of your glasses.
Strange New Hacking Technique
By spying on the reflection in your glasses, hackers are able to steal private information from your computer screen while you are connected to video conferencing solutions, like Microsoft Teams, Webex by Cisco, and Zoom.
A report from researchers at the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University demonstrated how the reflection in glasses could be the source of a data hack.
According to the report, on-screen texts as small as 10mm can be viewed with over 75% accuracy via a 720p webcam.
The experiment was done under controlled laboratory conditions, and results may be affected by real-life variables, such as the skin colour of participants, display brightness, room lighting, the contrast between the text and background, plus the glasses themselves.
