Teams has introduced active speaker view to improve meeting flow for users.
Active speaker view enables users to track the current active speaker. The active speaker’s video will also be rendered at a higher resolution to improve visual clarity. Teams uses 16:9 tiles and consistent placement of audio and video participants on the same stage to generate a seamless experience. Toggling videos on or off will not affect the active speaker stage to be re-rendered.
The area of the video assigned to the active speaker can also be used for sharing content to create seamless transitions during presentations.
Jan Steberl, Microsoft Teams Programme Manager, wrote in a blog post:
Speaker View is particularly effective in scenarios with a limited number of key speakers and a large audience, such as town halls, trainings, or lectures – especially from the student’s perspective.”
Active speaker is not the default view at the beginning of meetings. Users must select the “Speaker view” option under “View” in the meeting toolbar.
Dozens of New Features
It’s been a busy month for Teams, with several lower-key but valuable features being introduced, including for meetings.
Microsoft has updated its Live Captions feature, allowing users to toggle off now its profanity filtering to see “the Captions as is”, as Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Steven Stein wrote in a blog. Users can change this toggle by accessing Settings in Teams, clicking “Captions and transcripts”, and then toggling “Filter profane words in meeting captions”.
There have also been new updates for Teams Phone, including the user capability of changing greetings and announcements for their respective call queues and auto attendants without leaving the Teams platform. Another Teams Phone update is compliance recording for redirecting calls within Teams. Redirected scenarios include forwarded and transferred calls, calls redirected to voicemail, delegated calls, and call-to-call groups.
More general new Teams features include an expanded view for users’ profile cards. This feature is already present in Outlook, for example, but will now mean Teams users have access to “richer profile data”, as Stein describes it, by expanding a user’s profile within Teams chats, channels, calls or meetings. Users can learn more about their colleagues’ contact information, job title, LinkedIn profile and even birthdays.
There is also a new “Notes” tab users can access when creating a new channel in Teams. Businesses that have integrated OneNote will automatically see a new “Notes” tab created. There will be a OneNote workbook created for the channel, and team members will be able to add and edit their notes, attach files, and recall and search for channel notes.
Teams has also updated its files app experience to incorporate a more advanced panel for users to more quickly discover, access, download, and share files from their chats, channels, or meetings. As with the new Notes tab, Teams’ new file app function is powered by OneDrive.
A Busy May for Teams
Several May updates were either launched or previewed earlier this month.
Last week during Microsoft’s Build update, Teams introduced immersive spaces to enable users to make meetings more engaging by injecting “a sense of natural co-presence”.
Powered by Mesh, Microsoft’s holographic virtual collaboration platform, users can access the immersive spaces feature through either a PC or VR headset. Users can connect with other participants regardless of whether they join a Teams meeting using video, as a virtual avatar or in the immersive space directly.
The Build update also confirmed that Avatars for Microsoft Teams is a feature now generally available for 365 Business and Enterprise licenses via the Teams desktop app on Windows and Mac. These virtual avatars intend to provide an alternative to the current “binary” option of video or no video, as the report describes it, for Teams meetings. The feature also includes customizable avatars and reactions.
A few weeks ago, the official 365 Roadmap indicated that a new Teams feature would allow users to share links to specific messages in group chats so collaborators can find information more easily. The intent is to make finding essential information more efficient by removing the obstacle of scanning through blocks of text in the group chat for the precise message that users need to find.
Also earlier this month, Teams introduced a capability for users to create “offline” meetings. The update means users can create a calendar invite within Teams for events such as personal appointments, in-person meetings and lunch break slots. These events will record users as offline without having to be in a planned video meeting. This is similar to an “offline” feature already present in Outlook, corresponding to the profile cards expansion feature that has also been adapted from Outlook.
Teams also recently added a swathe of features for users to express themselves more during meetings. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced it was refreshing Teams’ virtual backgrounds library with animated versions so users can present their individuality. A fresh set of still images have already been added to the Teams collection and will be followed by the animated versions in June.
At the start of May, Teams also launched a more niche feature — a Teams Payments app intending to help small and medium businesses (SMBs). It meant SMBs could now manage and collect payments for the products and services they provide over Teams — including classes, webinars and appointments — during conversations within the Teams platform. Microsoft partnered with Stripe, PayPal and GoDaddy to support Teams Payments with commerce features.
