Microsoft recently announced a new suite of features intended to appear within Teams throughout 2018. The collection includes features that will help users to transcribe, record, and save meetings in the cloud. What’s more, there will also be inline message translation and integration with Microsoft’s very own voice assistant, Cortana.
The integration with a virtual assistant should give Microsoft quite the edge in its attempt to outshine other competing collaboration software like Slack. Now that more companies are progressively making the move towards team collaboration and productivity apps.
Bringing Voice Computing to the Workplace
Voice is gradually seeing a wider adoption in the workplace, with Microsoft and Amazon recently announcing that both Alexa and Cortana would be able to work seamlessly together. According to Microsoft, their decision to Integrate Teams with Cortana should help users to make calls more easily, join meetings, and add people to conferences using nothing but natural language. This new feature could be a fantastic way for Microsoft to get ahead of its competitors, however, it’s only one of the many upgrades planned for 2018.
During this year, Teams will also see the arrival of cloud recording – another solution that will take advantage of recent developments in cloud technology. Teams will have the opportunity to record meetings with nothing but a click and create automatic transcriptions of whatever was said. Attendees in meetings will be able to play back key parts of their recordings with the help of transcription guidance.
Microsoft has suggested that the transcription service will be upgraded in the future with facial recognition to make sure remarks are properly attributed to the right people.
A Host of New Microsoft Teams Features
Aside from integration with Cortana and transcription features, Microsoft has also promised the delivery of new inline messaging translations between a range of languages in chat and conversation channels. There’ll also be a background blurring option for video calls, proximity detection to add Skype systems to meetings, and mobile sharing facilities too. Mobile sharing will mean that attendees can share video live streams and photos from their mobile devices.
Alongside the huge selection of planned features, Microsoft has also announced new calling features for the enterprise-grade system, including call delegation and consultative transfer. There’s also Direct Routing available, which allows customers to integrate their existing telephony with Teams.
Additionally, Teams will also be available across a range of meeting room devices, including the Microsoft Surface Hub, and a selection of partner-created devices like those from HP and Lenovo, as well as Plantronics, Crestron, Yealink, Pexip, and Polycom.
Teams is Gaining Traction
Alongside all the recent updates, Microsoft also gave an insight into the popularity of Microsoft Teams, now that just over a year has passed since its introduction. Currently, there are 200,000 customers in the Teams environment, over 181 markets, using 39 different languages. Some of the users include NASCAR, General Motors, RLH Corporation, Navistar, and Macy’s.
Of course, Teams still has a long way to go before it overtakes Slack, which currently has about 9 million active users per week across 100 countries. According to statistics released in September 2017, Slack also recently grew to have more than 6 million daily users too.
