Microsoft is adding a slew of new features to its video conferencing tool Microsoft Teams. Couple of weeks after Microsoft enhanced the AI-based noise cancellation feature for Teams, Microsoft has now announced few new features like live captions with speaker attribution, a meeting report, the ability to pin messages or individual feeds, and more. The new features mostly deal with meetings, calling, chats, and collaboration, along with the introduction of a new section called 'App Spotlight.'
The most highlighted new feature is live captions with speaker attribution. This will show attendees subtitles when someone is speaking, along with the speaker's name. This feature can be activated within the call settings, by selection 'Turn on Live Captions.' Further, Teams will now allow presenters to pin any individual's video feed for all attendees. Once pinned, the individual will be identified as the 'Spotlight' and will be the main video for all participants. This feature is applicable for Microsoft Teams users on PC, Mac, and mobile (view only).
Another new feature will allow meeting organisers and presenters to prevent attendees from unmuting during the meeting and enable specific attendees to unmute when they raise their hands. This feature has been introduced for online conferences and classes, giving the teacher or the speaker the control of who is speaking.
In addition, Microsoft Whiteboard read-only mode is also available in Teams now. This will allow presenters to either present the digital whiteboard in read-only mode or allow others to edit and collaborate when given access.
Microsoft also announced that Teams meetings and call recordings can now be stores in OneDrive or in SharePoint. The Video conferencing tool will also allow meeting organisers to download a participant report to check how many people attended an event or meeting.
Apart from all of these changes, Microsoft announced that it is changing its meeting policies to allow IT administrators more control over how video is managed in Microsoft Teams. While the current policy can only be set to prevent outgoing video, Microsoft has now extended the Allow IP video policy to prevent both outgoign and incoming video as needed.