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| Microsoft brings OpenAI AI capabilities to Teams Premium |
Microsoft announced Wednesday that a paid version of its video conferencing service is now available, with features based on OpenAI's artificial intelligence-based GPT 3.5 language model.
The American tech giant wrote in its blog that thanks to the model (GPT-3.5), the Teams Premium service offers a smart summary that automatically notes notes, tasks, ideas, and important items for meetings.
Paid services also offer branded meetings, custom meeting templates, and other features such as watermarking to protect meeting content.
Smart summaries are the biggest addition to the Teams premium service, which costs $7 per month through June 30 and drops to $10 per month after that.
This new feature is believed to attract many users, especially because it can save notes, tasks, and highlights spoken during meetings even when they are not there. Annotations, user mentions, and full text will be available, with each speaker's contributions highlighted in an easy-to-read timeline, broken down by topic and chapter.
When an employee mentions a colleague in a meeting, they get a dedicated tab in the timeline to quickly see what was shared and discussed. While most of the smart summary features are available today, Microsoft says some of them won't arrive until the second quarter of 2023.
The new changes also include the privacy of some features of the free version of Teams for paid subscribers, including: live subtitles, coordinated scene groups (together mode), and some virtual dating features.
Microsoft says the live captions feature will give existing Teams users a 60-day grace period, while virtual meetings will only be available for 30 days.
Another feature of Teams Premium that may attract more companies is advanced protection for meetings. These include security measures such as watermarking during meetings, flagging sensitive content, or the ability to prevent users from recording meetings and copying text from meeting conversations. Microsoft claims these features "stop leaks" or keep chats private.
Teams Premium also includes webinar capabilities so companies can host events with registration queues, customizable start and end times, and virtual lounges.
Notably, the addition of the (OpenAI) model (GPT-3.5) to Teams Premium comes just days after Microsoft expanded its partnership with the AI technology company with "multi-year, multi-billion dollar investments."
There are also rumors that Microsoft is preparing to bring OpenAI technology to its desktop applications, as well as integrating its popular chatbot (ChatGPT) with the Bing search engine.
Microsoft offered a 30-day trial of Teams Premium last December as a preview of the features available today. Subscriptions are now available globally for all companies.