Microsoft Teams will be translate conference participants’ conversations into nine languages

Microsoft has introduced a new Interpreter feature for Microsoft Teams that allows users to clone their voices and translate speech in real time in nine languages. This solution is aimed at creating more natural communication in multilingual teams.

Key features of the Interpreter feature:

1. Available languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese, and Spanish.
2. Voice cloning: The translation will be played in a voice similar to the original to create a more personalized communication.
3. Privacy: Microsoft ensures that biometric data is not stored. The user must consent to activate the feature, and voice simulation can be turned off in settings.
4. Availability: The option will be available only to Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Given concerns about potential abuses (such as deepfake fraud), Microsoft has announced additional security measures, including strict privacy policies and access controls.

The Interpreter feature will launch in early 2025 and will be a useful tool for international meetings, facilitating communication between participants with different languages.

Microsoft has released a virtual assistant for Teams based on its Copilot AI, which is supposed to help groups of people work together more effectively. Team Copilot is only available to Microsoft 365 users and will be released in a preview later in 2024.

Key features of Team Copilot that Microsoft believes can make group video calls easier:

• The organizer can ask Team Copilot to summarize conversations in Microsoft Teams. The assistant will also take notes during the discussion, and any participant can edit or delete them as desired.
• Based on the conversations, Team Copilot can suggest a plan for further action – for example, recommending the next meeting with a specific colleague or team.
• As the meeting facilitator, Team Copilot can monitor that the timing for each topic is adhered to during the meeting.
• Teams Copilot can communicate with team members in chats to help them achieve specific goals. It can also search and provide specific chat topics on request, search the Internet on behalf of users, answer questions about the discussion, and more.
• Team Copilot can also act as a project manager in Planner: create and assign tasks and goals to employees.

Among other new features for Teams, Microsoft has offered real-time transcripts, the ability for organizers to control settings for who can record meetings, live reactions, noise cancellation, a picture-in-picture feature for iOS and Android, file sharing during a call, support for slash commands, and more.

Incidentally, at Google I/O, the search engine giant also introduced “AI Teammate,” which, like Team Copilot, can answer questions based on group chat discussions.