Microsoft is adding OpenAI technology to Teams through a paid offering called Microsoft Teams Premium. The features aim to help people catch up on meetings, find key moments and understand what needs to happen afterward.
Meeting recaps aim to save catch-up time
The service’s “intelligent recap” can add chapters to meeting minutes, create notes, recommend tasks and provide personalized highlights. Microsoft presents these tools as a way to make meetings more efficient, particularly for people who were unable to attend.
AI-generated chapters can divide a meeting recording into sections, drawing on its transcript. Microsoft says this can reduce the time needed to catch up on a missed meeting. The chapter feature is available for PowerPoint Live meeting recordings.
Personalized timeline markers offer another way to navigate a recording. They show when a participant joined and left. Microsoft said markers would later indicate when each person spoke, and let users see when their name was mentioned.
Notes and suggested tasks extend the recap
GPT 3.5, the model behind ChatGPT, is part of the Teams AI upgrade. Microsoft says its automatically generated notes are designed to capture a meeting’s main points and takeaways, reducing the need for participants to write everything down themselves.
The software is also intended to derive suggested tasks and action items from those notes. These AI note-taking and text features were planned for the second quarter of 2023, so they were not described as available at launch.
Together, the recap tools connect a meeting’s content with its follow-up. Chapters and markers can help someone locate relevant discussion, while notes and suggested actions are meant to make next steps easier to identify. The article describes these as Microsoft’s intended benefits.
Live translated captions are already available
Teams Premium also includes live captions generated by AI and translated into employees’ preferred languages. For a meeting to use live translations, only its organizer needs to have Teams Premium.
That arrangement means the organizer’s subscription can enable translated captions for other participants. The feature addresses language access during the meeting itself, while recaps and notes focus on reviewing the discussion afterward.
A paid tier for AI meeting tools
Microsoft is marketing the AI-enhanced service as Microsoft Teams Premium for $10 per month. At launch, it was to cost $7 per month for a limited time.
The package groups several kinds of help: tools for reviewing recordings, features for tracking participation and name mentions, automated meeting notes, proposed follow-up tasks and translated captions. Some capabilities were already available, while the notes and suggested actions were planned for a later quarter.
The upgrade is part of Microsoft’s broader integration of OpenAI technology into its products, following its recent billion-dollar investment in OpenAI. The source also reported that Microsoft was rumored to be planning GPT-4 as a chatbot in Bing Search, with the new Bing Search expected to roll out in the upcoming weeks.