Microsoft is making improvements to the way its Copilot AI assistant works in Microsoft Teams and is using artificial intelligence to further integrate hybrid meetings. As the company leans deeper into AI, it continues to push hardware manufacturers to build an AI-optimized PC, making sure to include a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key. Microsoft joins Intel, Qualcomm and AMD in championing purpose-built AI PCs. In the meantime, the tech giant continues to build out features for existing PCs. The company is adding new ways to tap into the Copilot tool for meetings, chats, summaries and more.

While Copilot can already summarize Teams content, in the coming months it will be able to combine spoken transcripts and written chats into one view in an effort to save time catching up after the fact on meetings, emails or chat threads. Copilot in Teams is also upgrading message composition, letting you “adjust your message to add a call to action, or like how a pirate would speak.”

“Soon, you will also be able to generate a new message based on the context in the Teams chat,” Microsoft explains in a blog post. Company research indicates “11 minutes of time savings is all it takes for most people to feel like AI is useful, and that after 11 weeks — about one business quarter — most users say it improves their work across key areas like productivity and having fewer meetings.”

Microsoft says intelligent call recap for Teams calls via phone “will be generally available next quarter with Teams Premium,” currently being offered at $7 per person per month.

“Intelligent call recap will automatically take notes during calls, allowing you to summarize a phone call and see follow-up actions without having to awkwardly take notes,” reports The Verge, calling Copilot integration in Teams “already one of the more impressive examples of Microsoft’s AI integration into Office apps, with the ability to quickly recap meetings thanks to summaries that can even tell you exactly when you were mentioned in a meeting.”

Additional Teams updates focus on improving hybrid meetings via its IntelliFrame feature, which uses “Cloud AI to identify and capture individual video feeds of each in-room participant.” Later this year it will get automatic camera switching, “using AI to determine and select the optimized view of each person in a meeting room.”

Major PC stakeholders have been “pushing the idea of an ‘AI PC’ for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows,” The Verge reports, noting “that includes a system that comes with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), the latest CPUs and GPUs, and access to Copilot. It will also need to have the new Copilot key that Microsoft announced earlier this year.”

While the industry still awaits details of Microsoft’s plans for AI in Windows, “Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC,” The Verge adds.

Related:
Will Microsoft Drop Bing Brand for a More Integrated Copilot Search?, MediaPost, 3/26/24
Adobe and Microsoft to Bring Generative AI Capabilities to Microsoft 365, Technology Record, 3/27/24