If you’re constantly on the lookout for ways to boost your team’s productivity (and let’s be honest, who isn’t?), then you’re going to be thrilled with the latest enhancements Microsoft Teams is rolling out with its new Copilot features.
Microsoft is continually improving Copilot, so that valuable and productive generative AI can be easily accessed at any time. They’ve also been working hard on making Teams better, with a speedy rebuild of the app from the ground up. So it’s no surprise they have 4 new Copilot/Teams features being introduced that should save you loads of time and make your life easier.
Here are the 4 new Copilot features in Teams that you want to use:
Enhanced Message Composition
Improvements are being made to how users compose messages in Teams chat. If you can’t form just the right words, you can get an AI rewrite right there in the chat window with the click of a button. Or you can use Copilot to improve your message with things like adding a call to action. It also adds some fun and games with things like changing your text to be styled like a pirate. No matter how you use it, it allows for adapting and editing on the fly.
Integrated Meeting Summaries
In my opinion, one of the most practical features Copilot brings to the table is the ability to summarize Teams meetings. That feature is being taken to the next level with the ability to merge spoken transcripts and written chat from meetings into a single view. This feature is designed to help users efficiently catch up on missed meetings, and have perfectly complete notes.
Intelligent Call Recap
Meeting summaries are great, but what about phone calls? Now Copilot features intelligent call recap for summarizing traditional Teams calls made directly to phones. This new feature will automatically summarize calls and highlight follow-up actions. It’s not quite here yet but will be available next quarter with Teams Premium, so don’t fire your personal assistant quite yet. 😉
New Hybrid Meeting Features
In an ideal world, every attendee in a Teams meeting would be logged in to their account, with their camera on and name present. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and hybrid meetings are commonplace. Ever been in a meeting where some people are in a room on a single computer and others are joined remotely? That’s “hybrid” and it’s really hard to determine who is in the room and who is speaking.
So Copilot is helping these scenarios with automatic camera switching and IntelliFrame. IntelliFrame uses AI to determine who is speaking in a room, then zooming in and framing the speaking participant. This way remote participants can clearly see their face and gestures, enhancing communication.
This will be boosted even further with automatic camera switching. This will reference every video source, such as room cameras and laptop cameras, to ensure the room and attendees are best represented to remote participants.
It will also include speaker recognition, so every person who speaks gets identified appropriately, removing any confusion. Even better, advanced voice isolation will help cut out background location noise, including other people’s voices.
These benefits are in preview now, so expect them to get polished up and released later in the year.
Get Copilot
These new functionalities and improvements in Microsoft Teams are great examples of how AI tools can be used practically today in your business. To get Copilot for Microsoft 365, you must first have an existing M365 Business license. You can then get the Copilot as an add-on for $30 per user/month. This gets you access to Copilot not just in Teams, but all the M365 apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
If you’re curious about implementing Copilot in your business, want to leverage Teams to its fullest, or have questions about the Microsoft licensing (trust me, I know it is confusing), I can help – just reach out.