Microsoft has announced a number of new features that will be coming to Microsoft Teams later this year to commemorate the third anniversary of its workplace collaboration app.
As many employees have been forced to stay at home recently, there has been a huge uptick in the number of people working remotely. Microsoft Teams, which hit 20m daily active users in November of last year, has seen a huge increase in the number of people using the service and it now boasts 44m daily active users.
The new features recently announced by Microsoft will make it easier for organizations to conduct remote meetings and in a blog post, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro explained that the company is committed to facilitating remote work, saying:
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“It’s very clear that enabling remote work is more important than ever, and that it will continue to have lasting value beyond the COVID-19 outbreak. We are committed to building the tools that help organizations, teams, and individuals stay productive and connected even when they need to work apart.”
New features
To help users avoid distractions during meetings, Microsoft is planning to introduce a new real-time noise suppression feature to Teams later this year. By using AI, the company will be able to remove background noise from calls automatically.
A “raise hand” feature will also be coming to Microsoft Teams that will allow users to click a button to ask a question during large or busy meetings.
Teams will even be getting an offline mode which will allow users to read Teams chat messages and draft responses when there is no internet connectivity. The service will also soon give users the ability to pop out chats into separate windows to let users quickly switch between chats.
Despite Teams' high daily active user numbers, users will have to wait until later this year to test out these new features but it seems like they will make attending online meetings and working remotely a bit easier for employees when they release.
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Via The Verge
