Microsoft Teams has added ChatGPT to Microsoft Teams Premium. So what does this AI collaboration mean?
Here’s the quick-take.
Meetings have become more important than ever, with a 252% increase in weekly time spent in meetings since Covid-19 made our lives miserable. The amount of information that now needs to be processed has also skyrocketed.
Microsoft Teams is a program used for online meetings. During a meeting, participants can use instant messaging, share files, and share their screens, among other things. This means that people from all over the world can still have meetings despite their physical locations.
ChatGPT-3 is an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that is hugely popular. It is capable of understanding and generating human-like text. It does this after having been fed large amounts of existing text and working out how to answer new questions. The AI can come up with sales plans, blogs and scripts for marketing videos, among other things.
And now, when added to Teams, ChatGPT can record entire meetings, output the speech as text and then save it, so people who need the information can search using keywords, even months after the meeting happened.
Imagine being able to say, “Please tell me what Simon from sales said last Thursday about the gap in the market for red pens.”
Existing meeting programs like Slack will be under pressure as Teams seems likely to dominate the meetings market. That is, until Google tells us what they are doing with their AI Sparrow.
Microsoft Teams ChatGPT3 collab does what?
According to Microsoft, over 400 new features were added to Microsoft Teams last year, and more are expected to be added this year.
The Teams-ChatGPT combo can also do things like recommend tasks based on what people say in the meetings. It can schedule future meetings in real-time or if Celia asks you to send the report to Ludvig, or it could draft up an email to send and wait for the user to attach the documents.
Participants can include their Vietnamese manufacturing partner in the meeting, despite not speaking each other’s language, as there is real-time translation into 40 languages.
An interesting feature is that of intelligent recap. People who attended the meeting will receive automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalised highlights, even if they fell into a coffee and missed most of the meeting.
Personalised timeline markers are also a thing. These show when you joined or left the meeting, so you can catch up on what you missed.
And then there’s the note-taking. AI-generated notes will soon come onstream, and they will provide key points and takeaways after the meeting.
ChatGPT-3 and secrets
Participants will also be able to protect information that might be sensitive. Did Aiko not meet her sales targets? Is David from the warehouse stealing loo roll? Information discussed in meetings can have a “sensitive information” label put on it, so not all eyes can see it. So you can go back to talking about those members of staff having that affair that everyone definitely knows about.
Teams meetings can also be live-streamed so that training information and company announcements can be viewed by everyone concerned. This reduces the load on the network, prevents connectivity issues and poor video quality.
Microsoft Teams, AI and the metaverse
AI: As people are increasingly working remotely, it seems that Microsoft Teams are making the transition to the Metaverse workplace even easier. Will we all be meeting in virtual reality in the future? It seems highly likely. So maybe it is time to get a really, really cool avatar, because we reckon you might need it sooner than we all realise.
