Microsoft Teams launches a new AI-powered premium version

3 Feb 2023

Image: © gguy/Stock.adobe.com

With features such as intelligent recap, timeline markers and live translations, Teams Premium will cost $10 per month.

Microsoft has finally made its Teams Premium product generally available, incorporating the power of OpenAI technology to add new features to its popular collaborative work tool.

Teams Premium comes with the latest developments in AI including large language models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 to make meetings of all kinds “more intelligent, personalised and protected”.

Microsoft said it has added more than 400 new features and improvements to Teams over the last year and many more are in the pipeline for 2023.

“But some customers are looking for Teams to do more – offer more advanced meeting capabilities to increase productivity and help to consolidate their software investments to reduce costs,” Nicole Herskowitz, vice-president of Microsoft Teams, wrote in a blog.

“Today, many organisations not only pay for meeting solutions, but also purchase expensive add-on products for webinars, virtual appointments, meeting intelligence and more.”

Teams Premium, which was first announced in October, comes at a cost of $10 per month. However, Microsoft is making the product available for $7 per month for a limited time to encourage more people to buy the service.

One of the stand-out features of Teams Premium is intelligent recap, which uses OpenAI technology to automatically generate meeting notes, recommend tasks and provide personalised highlights to help participants get information even if they missed the meeting.

The feature will also automatically generate meeting chapters based on the transcript. Personalised timeline markers will help anyone who pops out of a meeting to listen back to the part they missed – including the times when the person’s name was mentioned.

“With intelligent recap, you can now save time spent reviewing meeting recordings. AI-generated chapters divide the meeting into sections so it’s easy to pick and choose the content most relevant to you,” Herskowitz said.

Microsoft said that also coming soon is a feature that allows participants to see key points and takeaways after the meeting with AI-generated notes automatically created and powered by GPT-3.5. This will be followed by AI-generated tasks automatically suggested for the participant.

Another key feature of Teams Premium is live translations, which provides AI-powered translations of spoken language in real-time to enable users speaking different languages to collaborate.

“Only the meeting organiser needs to have Teams Premium for all meeting attendees to enjoy live translations,” added Herskowitz.

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Vish Gain is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com