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.

Recommended Videos

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 computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
Microsoft announces major AI upgrade for Windows with smarter Copilot feature
The Copilot key shown on a white keyboard.

Microsoft announced improvements to Copilot in a blog post today, including a new Vision feature that allows the AI assistant to view and interact with users' Windows screens in real time.

As part of Microsoft's 50th anniversary, it announced a huge improvement to Copilot, making it more personalized and guiding users through tasks at every step. Microsoft introduced Vision in Copilot for the web last year, but the announcement is now for Windows and mobile. You can use the native Windows app to use Copilot when working across various apps, files, and browser tabs. Vision in Copilot will read your screen and interact with it.

Read more
Microsoft’s Bing adds a Copolit Search mode to rival Google AI Search
Copilot Search for Bing Search engine.

Barely a few weeks ago, Google introduced a new AI Search mode. The idea is to provide answers as a wall of text, just the way an AI chatbot answers your queries, instead of the usual Search Results with blue links to different sources.

Microsoft is now in the race, too. The company has quietly rolled out a new Copilot Search option for its Bing search engine. The feature was first spotted by Windows Latest, but Digital Trends can confirm that it is now accessible across all platforms. 

Read more
Microsoft finally adds missing Copilot+ AI tools to Intel and AMD PCs
Copilot+ PCs being announced from the stage.

If you bought into the promise of a new AI-charged Copilot+ PC with the latest-gen Intel or AMD processor, and found a few tricks missing, the long wait is over. A handful of those Copilot+ features are finally expanding beyond machines with a Snapdragon X series processor inside. 

It’s roughly been a year since Microsoft introduced the Copilot+ PC label, a new breed of computing machines that put AI performance at the forefront. For months, Qualcomm was the sole silicon supplier for such machines. 

Read more