Many businesses and schools have taken advantage of the comprehensive tools available in Microsoft 365, and the introduction of Microsoft Teams to the suite expands this functionality even further. Microsoft Teams is designed to improve communication within an enterprise by "bringing people, conversations, and content together" - including video and voice communications as well as threaded conversations organized by user-created topics and tabs. In a collaborative environment these utilities are critical in ensuring that all team members are up to date on changes, plans, and most of all can easily contact each other, especially if members are located around the world. And, according to Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice-president for the Office team at Microsoft, it "provides a modern conversation experience for today’s teams." Teams has been designed to work seamlessly with standard Microsoft Office products such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI and Delve.
In recent years, Microsoft has expanded its interest in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the first of which being the Cortana AI found on Windows phones. By applying the lessons learned and the technology they've developed so far, Microsoft hopes to make its Teams product more intuitive by responding to users' vision and speech as well as processing language, knowledge extraction, and web searches more accurately and efficiently. The distinction between Teams and past efforts at AI is that the software has now been "trained" to learn, and with varying needs within an enterprise this ability to adapt is critical. And, paired with new lighting-fast field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, cloud-based AI solutions can perform complex and extensive requests in milliseconds. Microsoft demonstrated this ability by having a AI utility translate spoken French to English and Dutch simultaneously.
By applying AI methods to office technology, Microsoft hopes to learn more about how individual businesses work and how to best provide products that are able to take on tasks previously performed by workers.
To read more, visit ComputerWeekly's article on Microsoft Teams and AI