Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Microsoft Teams Premium uses AI to automatically recap your meetings

Microsoft has just made Teams Premium available for a short time. The preview will allow Microsoft’s customers to test out some of the new features that won’t be widely available for a while yet.

A few interesting features are making an appearance during this short trial run, including the ability to add custom branding to meetings, live translated captions, and meeting recaps prepared by artificial intelligence (AI).

Three women in a Microsoft Teams meeting.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Microsoft broke the news in a blog post, announcing that Teams Premium is now available for testing by Microsoft’s commercial customers. Most of the new options are related to hosting meetings and calls, and there seems to be plenty to dig into.

Microsoft opens by talking about meeting branding. This means that Teams Premium admins will be able to add custom logos, together mode scenes, and backgrounds to the meeting lobby, affecting their entire organization.

This also stretches to virtual appointments. Teams Premium offers branded virtual appointments alongside a slew of appointment-management tools, such as a centralized dashboard that tracks all schedules and queues. It also offers insight into statistics like the number of no-shows and how long the wait times are for particular appointments. Teams Premium can also send out text reminders to customers who book an appointment.

When setting up a meeting, users will be able to take advantage of meeting guides — a new feature that lets you pick between different meeting types, such as client calls or a brainstorming session.

Another interesting feature is the addition of live translated captions, including 40 spoken languages. Not too long ago, Microsoft announced that Teams supports live translation with the help of human interpreters, and this seems like an extension of that.

Microsoft has also added some advanced new host controls and event management tools to webinars, and from now on, Teams Premium will allow hosts to keep the event registration open even if the event has reached maximum capacity. This puts users on a waitlist.

Microsoft Teams Premium Experiences and How to Set It Up

One of the cooler things now available for testing by Teams Premium users is the intelligent meeting recap. This relies on AI to pinpoint the highlights of the meeting and generate recaps without user input. Lastly, Teams Premium kicks security up a notch. Users will be able to add a watermark to their videos, and Microsoft added end-to-end encryption for meetings.

Enrolling in the trial program is done through the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Microsoft will be handing out a limited number of trial licenses, and with those, select users will be able to test out Teams Premium ahead of the official launch in February 2023. Once it launches, the software will most likely be sold separately as an addition to Microsoft 365 or Office 365.

Monica J. White
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
How to create a pivot table in Excel to slice and dice your data

Microsoft Excel is arguably the greatest spreadsheet application from Redmond, and there's a good reason so many number crunchers use it for all of their number crunching needs. While using Microsoft Excel is fine for simple spreadsheets to track expenses or build calendars, it comes into its own when you need to slice and dice and then present complex data. Here, we show you how to create a pivot table in Excel to take advantage of one of the application's most powerful tools.

Before we start, just what exactly are pivot tables good for? Simply put, pivot tables let you look at the same data in different ways and from different angles, to make it easier to perform in-depth analysis and to spot important trends. When you're evaluating sales results, for example, you may want to look at an individual person, a specific product, or a specific timeframe. With a pivot table, you can create one pool of information and then easily change your focus from one thing to another -- an analysis that would be tedious to perform manually.

Read more
The most common Microsoft Teams problems and how to fix them
A close-up of someone using Microsoft Teams on a laptop for a videoconference.

Microsoft Teams was introduced in 2017 as a unified communication and collaboration platform aimed at helping businesses and organizations get things done. Microsoft leveraged the company's existing Office software experience and created a unified experience between Teams, Office 365, and Skype for Business. However, as with all software, things don't always go according to plan. If you're using Microsoft Teams, sometimes you can run into problems.

We're big Teams users here at Digital Trends -- it's our go-to communication and meeting tool -- and we've come across a few issues ourselves over the years. In the event you're having Microsoft Teams issues, here's how to fix some of the most common problems.

Read more
What is Microsoft Edge and how to use it
Microsoft Edge on a laptop on a couch.

If you just purchased a new Windows computer and see Microsoft Edge is installed, you might be wondering if it’s worth your time.

Is Microsoft Edge a secure web browser that keeps you safe when you’re online? Can you customize it like other popular browsers? What happened to Internet Explorer?

Read more