Skip to main content

This new Microsoft Teams feature is like Snapchat for your office chats

Microsoft Teams is getting a new Snapchat-like feature called “Video Clip.” The new feature lets you record, send, and view short videos through Microsoft Teams, and deliver your message at a tap of a button.

Messages can also be played back at convenience.

The video clip feature in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft

Announced during Microsoft’s annual Inspire conference, Video Clip builds on existing features like Front Row and Together Mode and is designed to help make hybrid work a bit more immersive. Or, as Microsoft puts it, help people work “synchronously, and asynchronously.” Basically, that means they are designed to make your chats more immersive, since you’ll be seeing the person at the other end of the message, instead of just reading messages.

Microsoft wasn’t clear on when Video Clip will roll out to Teams, but it provided us with a demo showing the feature in action. When the feature is ready for you, you’ll be able to click a new video camera icon at the bottom of a one-to-one chat to open up your camera in Teams. You can then press a record button. Messages in the demo have a one-minute limit, and you can then click a “Review” button to playback or edit parts of the message before sending it out.

But that’s just one thing that is coming to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft is also working on Excel Live. This builds on Live Share in Teams, which was previously announced at the company’s Build Developer Conference. Excel Live lets people collaborate on workbooks in real-time during Teams meetings.

Introducing Storyline

Microsoft Inspire also saw the expansion of Microsoft Viva with Viva Engage, a new app in Teams to help build community and connection. It brings consumer-like social networking to the workplace to help spark engagement. Microsoft Storyline and Stories fits in with that, letting you share experiences, celebrate milestones, and follow your favorite colleagues.

Rounding out the list of Teams features announced during Inspire is Collaborative Annotations. This feature will let all meeting participants draw, type, and react on top of content shared in a meeting. This feature is already generally available, as it is powered by Microsoft Whiteboard.

Editors' Recommendations

Arif Bacchus
Arif Bacchus is a native New Yorker and a fan of all things technology. Arif works as a freelance writer at Digital Trends…
Microsoft has a new way to keep ChatGPT ethical, but will it work?
Bing Chat shown on a laptop.

Microsoft caught a lot of flak when it shut down its artificial intelligence (AI) Ethics & Society team in March 2023. It wasn’t a good look given the near-simultaneous scandals engulfing AI, but the company has just laid out how it intends to keep its future efforts responsible and in check going forward.

In a post on Microsoft’s On the Issues blog, Natasha Crampton -- the Redmond firm’s Chief Responsible AI Officer -- explained that the ethics team was disbanded because “A single team or a single discipline tasked with responsible or ethical AI was not going to meet our objectives.”

Read more
Microsoft’s new Designer app makes generative AI dead simple
A screenshot of Microsoft's new Designer app.

The Microsoft Designer app is now available as a public preview after the brand first announced it in October 2022.

The Designer app is Microsoft's productivity spin on AI art tools such as OpenAI's DALL-E 2, which also gained popularity last year.

Read more
Even Microsoft thinks ChatGPT needs to be regulated — here’s why
A MacBook Pro on a desk with ChatGPT's website showing on its display.

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have been taking the world by storm, with the capabilities of Microsoft’s ChatGPT causing wonderment and fear in almost equal measure. But in an intriguing twist, even Microsoft is now calling on governments to take action and regulate AI before things spin dangerously out of control.

The appeal was made by BSA, a trade group representing numerous business software companies, including Microsoft, Adobe, Dropbox, IBM, and Zoom. According to CNBC, the group is advocating for the US government to integrate rules governing the use of AI into national privacy legislation.

Read more