Microsoft is launching a Premium version of its Teams service. On the program: more than 400 new functions, including the automated summary of meetings and the chaptering of presentations with timeline markers based on ChatGPT.
Microsoft is betting big on OpenAI, the American start-up that developed ChatGPT, the conversational AI that is driving the Internet crazy. The company has just invested several billion dollars in it and plans to integrate the technology into its Bing search engine and its Microsoft 365 office suite (see our article). And she obviously does not intend to stop there! It’s the turn of Teams, its videoconferencing and collaboration software, to take advantage of it via the new Premium subscription. The latter has been available for public preview since December, having first been announced in October as part of the publisher’s Ignite event. It brings new functions – more than 400 according to Microsoft – some of which are based on GPT-3.5, the language model also used for ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator.
In his press releaseMicrosoft findse” a 252% increase in weekly time spent in meetings in the first two years of the pandemic“, which has the effect of causing “a ton of time-consuming administrative work during meetings, such as taking notes, picking up important takeaways, defining actions and assigning them to the right people“. The AI will therefore serve as a sort of assistant to the user to carry out tedious tasks. Teams Premium is available from 1er February in the United States and should soon follow in the rest of the world. Pricing is set at $10 per month – with an introductory price of $7 until June 30 – and users are entitled to a free trial for 30 days. Note that while most of the functions related to GPT-3.5 are available today, some will not arrive before the second quarter of 2023.
Teams Premium: summary of meetings and chaptering of presentations
Thanks to the artificial intelligence of OpenAI, Teams Premium will perform “intelligent recaps”that is to say that he will make notes that will summarize what was said during the meeting and the tasks that everyone must carry out within the framework of the project in order to do “save time when reviewing meeting recordings”. This should help those who have trouble juggling between listening and taking notes. Even better, the tool will offer “timeline markers” which will be visible to the user only and will indicate when they joined or left the meeting, when their name was spoken and when the screen was shared. This should help you know which passages to listen to again carefully. Finally, Teams Premium will automatically generate meeting chapters that divide the meeting into sections through PowerPoint Live. Later in the year 2023, these markers “will expand to include speaker timeline markers that will show you who spoke during the meeting, when they spoke, and allow you to jump to when”. The goal is to be able to focus exclusively on the meeting and thus be more productive.
Of course, Teams Premium also offers many functions that have nothing to do with GPT-3.5. Microsoft will in particular reserve certain options integrated into the other Teams offers to reserve them for its Premium subscription. Additionally, subscribers will have access to real-time translated captions, creation of custom meeting templates – a customer call, a brainstorming meeting or a help desk call for example – with the option to add company-specific backgrounds, logos and colors in mid-February. Finally, the new subscription will have a high level of security in order to avoid leaks, in particular with the addition of watermarks, the impossibility of copying and pasting, confidentiality labels and encryption for up to 50 participants.