Microsoft has updated Teams Rooms with its “biggest release of the year”.
The solution, specifically its Pro version, has been upgraded with a whole suite of new features for Windows v4.18, including Cloud IntelliFrame to help make non-AI cameras more intelligent and improvements to the Front Row gallery — such as a unified background for remote participants so they appear in the same room and immersive spatial audio.
Greg Baribault, Head of Product for Microsoft Teams Rooms, raved about the update on LinkedIn.
I am so excited about this release! Teams Rooms for Windows v4.18 is our biggest release of the year, including 4 features that I think you’ll really love.”
New Features Breakdown
The addition of Cloud IntelliFrame empowers non-AI cameras to be more intelligent. The offering enables participants in the room to appear similar to remote attendees, providing a more immersive experience for everyone regardless of where they’re dialling in. Participants can observe every facial expression and cue as if they were in person.
Among IntelliFrame’s specific features are multi-stream video, face recognition of in-room participants, active speaker recognition, attributed voice-based transcription, and panoramic video on front-of-room (180-degree view) and center-of-room (360-degree view) cameras. This solution elevates Teams Rooms on Windows cameras to next-gen intelligence.
There are two notable upgrades to the Front Tow experience, including video segmentation with a unified background. This feature removes individual backgrounds, tweaks the video participant’s size, and introduces a shared background for remote participants to appear as if they are in the same room. This minimises distractions and allows in-room participants to engage more meaningfully with remote participants in meetings.
Lastly, Spatial Audio adds next-generation immersive audio to Front Row when connected to stereo speakers. This intelligent audio technology offers a more inclusive experience for in-room participants by playing audio from a channel closer to the physical location of remote participants on the Front Row layout. In a similar ambition to the unified backgrounds, this feature aims to make it feel like remote participants are in the room with them to make it more engaging.
These features are generally available now for Teams Rooms Pro customers.
Teams Rooms’ Quietly Significant Summer
While several major Teams-oriented solutions have been attracting the most attention in 2023, such as the new Teams client and Copilot’s prospective integrations with the video conferencing software, Teams Rooms has had a quietly intriguing summer.
In June, this year’s Infocomm included several momentous Teams Rooms updates.
As well as the IntelliFrame released this week, the show announced that customers who had deployed the Yealink SmartVision 60 and the latest Jabra Panacast 50 would have access to intelligent speaker capabilities to recognise in-room speakers through voice recognition and automatically name the speakers within the transcript.
A profanity filtering toggle became available for online meetings, which could be turned on or off for live captions, while live caption improvements were added.
Several Teams Rooms for Android updates were also released earlier this summer, bridging the gap to the Windows version, including the capability for USB cameras on the device and the support for an alternative option of a content camera or magic whiteboard.
“The content capture, so if you’ve got a traditional analogue whiteboard and want to digitise that into a meeting, Android now supports this,” Graham Walsh, Microsoft MVP & Product Specialist at Neat, explained to UC Today in June. “This has been on Windows for quite a while, and now you can have this content camera on Android.”
In June, Microsoft announced it was extending the expiration date for personally licensed Teams Rooms hardware to allow customers more time to transition between licenses.
Initially, Microsoft had stated the cut-off date would be July 1 but had added a further 90 days of amnesty, extending the deadline to September 30, 2023. Even though the move would provide those affected with price reductions, it was clearly taking customers longer to process the transition than Microsoft had first expected.
Earlier this month, MAXHUB released its XT series of hardware kits, certified for Microsoft Teams Rooms.
According to MAXHUB, the kits have been designed for ease of use, with simple upgrades viable for transforming meeting rooms of any size into native Microsoft Teams Rooms environments. MAXHUB stressed that they bring “convenience and efficiency” into the user journey, from procurement, installation, and utilisation to post-maintenance.
