Microsoft Teams Premium: powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5(microsoft.com)
microsoft.com
Microsoft Teams Premium: powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/02/01/microsoft-teams-premium-cut-costs-and-add-ai-powered-productivity/
168 comments
I have zero shame about it so I might as well confess: I have no bloody idea how to use Teams with more than one organisation. I just set up a VM for each one. I am smart enough to automate a minimal install (the bar for that is pretty low, if we're being honest) but apparently not smart enough to use Teams.
It's beyond hilarious, two out of three times I end up in the wrong lobby with the wrong people and the wrong account despite doing the exact same thing, based on following the exact same guides on the Internet.
Unless you're using it on your domain-enrolled work computer (which, to be fair, is probably the demographics Microsoft cares about) Teams is basically chatroulette.
It's beyond hilarious, two out of three times I end up in the wrong lobby with the wrong people and the wrong account despite doing the exact same thing, based on following the exact same guides on the Internet.
Unless you're using it on your domain-enrolled work computer (which, to be fair, is probably the demographics Microsoft cares about) Teams is basically chatroulette.
> Unless you're using it on your domain-enrolled work computer (which, to be fair, is probably the demographics Microsoft cares about) Teams is basically chatroulette.
What do you mean? I sometimes use Teams on an AD-joined computer, and the multiple-account situation is beyond absurd. The whole freaking app has to restart when changing accounts, even though both are connected through the same exact AzureAD identity.
There is no difference whatsoever between the AD-joined Windows experience and the not-joined-to-anything Linux one.
What do you mean? I sometimes use Teams on an AD-joined computer, and the multiple-account situation is beyond absurd. The whole freaking app has to restart when changing accounts, even though both are connected through the same exact AzureAD identity.
There is no difference whatsoever between the AD-joined Windows experience and the not-joined-to-anything Linux one.
> What do you mean? I sometimes use Teams on an AD-joined computer, and the multiple-account situation is beyond absurd.
Ah, no, I mean, if you're using it for your corporate account on your AD-joined computer. These things usually have a single (work) account.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was never meant to be multiple-account, and that was just half-added as an afterthought at some point.
Ah, no, I mean, if you're using it for your corporate account on your AD-joined computer. These things usually have a single (work) account.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was never meant to be multiple-account, and that was just half-added as an afterthought at some point.
And if you collaborate with someone from another company you have a guest account there, which is somewhat derived from your main one, but also independent
Right? Not to be a Negative Nelly but IRC handles this just fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
If you are on your company internal IRC server, wanting to DM someone on another company's internal IRC server, inviting the login name they have on their side, IRC doesn't handle it fine, it doesn't handle it at all.
I guess I'm thinking of a somewhat hybrid situation.
I have my corporate account, [email protected], which is also configured on my domain-joined pc. This works well enough.
And with this same account, I connect to a separate tenant, where I'm a "guest". This separate tenant belongs to a partner corp, and they delegate the authentication to our tenant for people in our corp. So, I can almost use my credentials, meaning that I can use my regular login/password but have to have two MFAs (one for each tenant) for some reason.
But the "main" account seems aware of the other one because even on a fresh Windows install, just adding my me@corp account to teams adds the other one too. I just can't switch between the two without restarting teams, so I can only use one at a time.
I have my corporate account, [email protected], which is also configured on my domain-joined pc. This works well enough.
And with this same account, I connect to a separate tenant, where I'm a "guest". This separate tenant belongs to a partner corp, and they delegate the authentication to our tenant for people in our corp. So, I can almost use my credentials, meaning that I can use my regular login/password but have to have two MFAs (one for each tenant) for some reason.
But the "main" account seems aware of the other one because even on a fresh Windows install, just adding my me@corp account to teams adds the other one too. I just can't switch between the two without restarting teams, so I can only use one at a time.
It seems like Teams modeled this from Slack, Discord, etc., that have completely different selves per thing you join (arguably a very good idea for keeping selves separate), but the UI assumes you change your persona less often.
In Teams, click your face top right to change profiles (accounts), like you would in Edge. It's basically the concept of personas or profiles from Firefox or Chrome, but in Teams.
Note that you shouldn't have to change personas unless you want to. Guests can be invited, and join as their original persona instead of having to have an inside the tent account.
In Teams, click your face top right to change profiles (accounts), like you would in Edge. It's basically the concept of personas or profiles from Firefox or Chrome, but in Teams.
Note that you shouldn't have to change personas unless you want to. Guests can be invited, and join as their original persona instead of having to have an inside the tent account.
I once ended up doing a teams interview as my 8 year old, because Teams, or rather I, was unable to switch between my then start-up account and the school account of my kid. Confused the interviewer a bit in the beginning.
As good as Teams is whithin and across orgs, as long as you stick to one single account, as much it sucks with multiple accounts on the same machine. That, and all the crap like opening files in Teams when Office is installed. But the SharePoint is opening files in the browser instead of the native apps...
Teams Outlook intergration is neat so.
As good as Teams is whithin and across orgs, as long as you stick to one single account, as much it sucks with multiple accounts on the same machine. That, and all the crap like opening files in Teams when Office is installed. But the SharePoint is opening files in the browser instead of the native apps...
Teams Outlook intergration is neat so.
I am glad to read I am not the only one struggling with Teams and Orgs. I spent days trying to find out why I can't join any Teams meetings anymore. It turned out that the account was in an organization that got deactivated. And apparently it's not possible to remove oneself from such an organization… and it leads to your account being broken (at least for Teams meetings).
Depending how deeply you use it for each org a browser profile for each can ve done. If you do it in Firefox you can even do it in 1 window with tabs via containers. Downside is it doesn’t have the native desktop integrations at that point.
TeamsLobby, please invent me a plausible excuse for avoiding this meeting and deliver it to the other participants, then disconnect me.
The real premium version of Microsoft Teams will be the one that doesn't crash my Google Chrome window every 30-45 minutes.
That's why we're building FossTeams [1], an open source client for Microsoft Teams (:
The idea is to have a backend [2], powered by a library [3] that does the heavy lifting and a / multiple frontends to be used with that (e.g: CLI[4], Web frontend[5], Flutter app[6]).
We're looking for contributors! If you hate Teams and want to improve an Open Source version, PRs are welcome (:
[1]: https://github.com/fossteams
[2]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-backend
[3]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-api
[4]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli
[5]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-frontend
[6]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams_gui
The idea is to have a backend [2], powered by a library [3] that does the heavy lifting and a / multiple frontends to be used with that (e.g: CLI[4], Web frontend[5], Flutter app[6]).
We're looking for contributors! If you hate Teams and want to improve an Open Source version, PRs are welcome (:
[1]: https://github.com/fossteams
[2]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-backend
[3]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-api
[4]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli
[5]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-frontend
[6]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams_gui
You're brilliant martyrs, but it's such a shame that Teams is just universally accepted as a new enterprise thing. I've never really seen such an anticompetitive move by Microsoft in the last decade, but Teams has taken on both Slack and Zoom and friends and they shove it "for free" down their enterprise customers' throats. It's crying out for a competition authority investigation and a compulsory breaking up -- not just a FOSS client.
Can you elaborate on this point a bit? It seems to me that you are saying Microsoft should not be allowed to release their own version of Slack and Zoom for free. I don't see the argument for that, especially since Microsoft itself has in the past released free software that does essentially what these other tools also do, and largely inspired them (Skype, for example).
Sure.
> It seems to me that you are saying Microsoft should not be allowed to release their own version of Slack and Zoom for free.
That is exactly what I'm saying, because it is against EU competition law as Microsoft has a dominant position in the market -- the "plain English" guide to competition law simply states: [1]
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/selling-in-eu/competit...
> It seems to me that you are saying Microsoft should not be allowed to release their own version of Slack and Zoom for free.
That is exactly what I'm saying, because it is against EU competition law as Microsoft has a dominant position in the market -- the "plain English" guide to competition law simply states: [1]
If your company has a large market share, it holds a dominant position and must take particular care not to:
• charge unreasonably high prices which would exploit customers
• charge unrealistically low prices which may drive competitors out of the market
• discriminate between customers
• force certain trading conditions on your business partners
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/selling-in-eu/competit...
> it as part of a certain tier of M365 subscription for free.
So is it free or not? If it's part of a subscription, it's just included in the cost. The subscription already included a whole suite of different software, what makes Teams special in that regard? Who decides that Teams is a separate product and not just a feature of the O365 product?
So is it free or not? If it's part of a subscription, it's just included in the cost. The subscription already included a whole suite of different software, what makes Teams special in that regard? Who decides that Teams is a separate product and not just a feature of the O365 product?
These are all good questions, and you could have asked them about IE and Windows – where it was found to be anticompetitive behaviour. The answer to "who decides" is the national competition and markets authorities of the EU's member states, or the EU's competition commission. The main issue from a legal point of view is whether Microsoft is exploiting its dominant position in business services to make its competitors suffer unduly, if it was not dominant in another area – which you could make an argument for, in my opinion.
Thank you for the clarification.
I understand where you (and the law) are coming from, but when it comes to software it is hard to say what are "unrealistically low prices". Slack and Zoom also have free tiers, so how is it unrealistic for Microsoft to offer that as well? Looking at Google for example, would you say that they should be forced to charge for their services to reflect their costs? I doubt that either of these would be a good thing.
I understand where you (and the law) are coming from, but when it comes to software it is hard to say what are "unrealistically low prices". Slack and Zoom also have free tiers, so how is it unrealistic for Microsoft to offer that as well? Looking at Google for example, would you say that they should be forced to charge for their services to reflect their costs? I doubt that either of these would be a good thing.
Of course, but in the meantime since we can't change the situation (me and others who have been forced to use Teams) you have to stop the bleeding for those who are truly suffering from M$ + Management's decisions
I appreciate your efforts, because Teams is so terrible, but I'd love to avoid yet another chat application with its own UI. Pidgin is great for consolidating many of these walled garden chat services (e.g. Discord/Slack) into a unified UI, do you have any plans to develop a libpurple plugin?
Once we have a solid base library, it can be included as a plugin everywhere.
We've had already requests for a Weechat plugin [1], and Pidgin / Matrix are good candidates too.
[1]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli/issues/2
[1]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli/issues/2
What sets this project apart from the MS Graph API? Are there any API features that Graph does not have?
I have built an alternative Teams client for smart glasses using only MS Graph and Azure Communication Services and it can already do most interactions related to chat/meetings/org etc.
I have built an alternative Teams client for smart glasses using only MS Graph and Azure Communication Services and it can already do most interactions related to chat/meetings/org etc.
It's not using the MS Graph API and it's copying what the Teams Desktop client is doing.
This gives you a way to run an alternative client in corporations where you don't have the possibility to use third party apps. On top of that, since it's not using the Graph API, we might get better features that will take long time to be available in the Graph API.
This gives you a way to run an alternative client in corporations where you don't have the possibility to use third party apps. On top of that, since it's not using the Graph API, we might get better features that will take long time to be available in the Graph API.
I think it's funny that casual hobbyists can easily outproduce Microsoft's supposedly world class engineering organization. It's not even a question in anyone's mind either. You guys know you're going to beat them (or already have), everyone here takes it as a given, even the engineers at MSFT probably know it.
Even if they try to stop you guys, they probably won't be able to pull it off unless they can manage it in court
Even if they try to stop you guys, they probably won't be able to pull it off unless they can manage it in court
Why is that funny? I think it is normal that a hobby team working in a silo on an alternative client with a low amount of users move faster than a full engineering organization working on a mass rolled out product used in corporate environment all over the world.
For a new feature the hobby team can just hack away for a few nights, push the release and they are done.
The engineering org needs to plan and coordinate the feature across multiple teams (web app, desktop app, mobile app, Graph, teams admin panel, o365 admin panel,...) and then make sure it fits well into the rest of the MS infrastructure (policies, permission scopes, IT admin controls, licensing, auditing,...). Legal might need to be involved.
And then after aligning all those teams and waiting for each team to prioritize and do the work it needs to get into the MS roadmap as well going through the usual stages (private preview, public preview, General Availability). And once it hits GA it needs to be supported for many years.
For a new feature the hobby team can just hack away for a few nights, push the release and they are done.
The engineering org needs to plan and coordinate the feature across multiple teams (web app, desktop app, mobile app, Graph, teams admin panel, o365 admin panel,...) and then make sure it fits well into the rest of the MS infrastructure (policies, permission scopes, IT admin controls, licensing, auditing,...). Legal might need to be involved.
And then after aligning all those teams and waiting for each team to prioritize and do the work it needs to get into the MS roadmap as well going through the usual stages (private preview, public preview, General Availability). And once it hits GA it needs to be supported for many years.
Honest question, asked in good faith. What's your plan when for when the "cease and desist" letter is going to come in?
We'll see. We're doing nothing more than using undocumented APIs and in the end these clients are not competing against Microsoft Teams (but actually bringing / keeping more user base there). On top of that, we provide the code as MIT, so Microsoft can reuse the code for themselves.
If they still send a cease and desist letter, we'll probably comply and make sure the code is archived somewhere for people to continue / use the project (:
TL;DR: I would consider a cease and desist a success, and hope that Microsoft reuses the code
If they still send a cease and desist letter, we'll probably comply and make sure the code is archived somewhere for people to continue / use the project (:
TL;DR: I would consider a cease and desist a success, and hope that Microsoft reuses the code
I love you. Thank you for this.
I don’t think it can be really improved as long as Microsoft can sell this slow unstable piece of crap into all the big corporate by shameless bribing.
I used to work in a big corporate, suddenly all teams has to change to MS team even the current software works just fine. I just decided to quit.
I used to work in a big corporate, suddenly all teams has to change to MS team even the current software works just fine. I just decided to quit.
That's why this uses the same client ID as Microsoft Teams and connects to the same backends.
Don't get me wrong, the Teams servers aren't the fastest out there - but processing a 50 MB JSON with Javascript (well, Angular) is probably not needed at all if your goal is just to see a chat message. We do that heavy lifting on the server side (that anyways runs locally on your PC), so that the client can get the messages without all of the mess.
Don't get me wrong, the Teams servers aren't the fastest out there - but processing a 50 MB JSON with Javascript (well, Angular) is probably not needed at all if your goal is just to see a chat message. We do that heavy lifting on the server side (that anyways runs locally on your PC), so that the client can get the messages without all of the mess.
I get so tired of what would seem like very simple things breaking in Teams. All this last week I've been recording conference calls with Powerpoint. I understand there's a recording function within Teams, but it started out singleplayer with no one watching the demonstrations of my processes. Anyway, Teams will pop up notifications while I'm recording and it didn't used to. Hell, I'll be sharing my screen in Teams and it will show my notifications over the screen share.
So far I've been lucky that nothing surprising has been leaked to others or wound up in recordings, but this didn't used to happen.
So far I've been lucky that nothing surprising has been leaked to others or wound up in recordings, but this didn't used to happen.
The real premium version of teams would actually show people on the other end of the call what my side says I'm sharing.
Or one that works in Firefox without disconnecting you at random when you try to make a video call or join a conference.
Or a Windows app that doesn't crash and fuck up all the time. Or a Mac app that doesn't crash and fuck up all the time. Or a Linux app that isn't total and complete garbage. It's such a steaming pile of shit to try to do basic things with, but they're spending time on this shit.
I don't use Teams as a daily driver, but I would be a candidate for a paid upgrade pack that made it have the polish one expects from an app built by a public company. In particular, the emoji are terrible.
At this point, I'm way past hoping to see any polish.
I'd be happy if they improved the responsiveness. Say to the level of MSN Messenger 20 years ago, even though I'm running 2022 hardware.
I'd be happy if they improved the responsiveness. Say to the level of MSN Messenger 20 years ago, even though I'm running 2022 hardware.
For some reason, intra org Teams calls slow down Office (from outlook to Excel) down significantly at my place. Teams, outside the call, becomes basically unusable. Funny thing is, when having calls with people outside the org, everything is running just smooth and fine...
In my case, I mostly use Linux, so I use the online versions of the office apps, except for Teams. The other day I installed the local clients on a newish computer (11th gen i7, win 11) and was shocked by how sluggish Outlook felt.
I understand the online versions lack some features, but for my use-case they are great.
I understand the online versions lack some features, but for my use-case they are great.
My private daily is Linux, too. It is dual boot, mostly for gaming and because I am too lazy to figure out wireless scanning under Linux. Libre Office runs under Linux, school teams, some fames and scanning under Eindows 10. Plus, I can keep my kids stuff seperate from mine for the most part.
Facts. Unfortunately, this could very well be a pipe dream.
Bit disappointed at the level of discussion here, 90% of the comments are generic bitching about Teams. This press release really takes a while to get to the detail, but actually I think some this is great. The automated minutes are great feature, I know it's not going to be perfect but it'll pick up most of the heavy lifting which is kind of brilliant because it's always a PITA to be the notes taker. It doesn't even need to be particularly good, if I can just say "GPT Action Item:Blah" as part of our conversation in the meeting and it'll do the notes for me that's pretty cool. The summary and time markers I'm less bothered about, since it kind of assumes you'll record the meeting and come back and search through it, which I guess does sometimes happen, but not too often.
It's quite exciting that we're getting some proper applications of the technology that make sense. When the whole Crypto/Web3 boom was going on there was this constant question of "Yeah, but what actual use case are you solving". I think it's much easier to see an answer to that with ChatGPT style tech.
It's quite exciting that we're getting some proper applications of the technology that make sense. When the whole Crypto/Web3 boom was going on there was this constant question of "Yeah, but what actual use case are you solving". I think it's much easier to see an answer to that with ChatGPT style tech.
> Bit disappointed at the level of discussion here, 90% of the comments are generic bitching about Teams.
Because MS really needs to get their priorities straight. What good are AI meeting notes if the absolute basics of a VC/Chat software don't work properly? Just from the past few days, I've had
- Chat messages turning up hours later, or are not shown as new and I see them later by accident
- Images in chats are not loading
- In VC, I can't see people who have joined the meeting after me
- Status is stuck on "away" although I'm working with Teams
- Having to set up my audio/video setting for each new meeting again
Maybe fix these things first before working on AI meeting notes? But the fact is: many companies only use Teams because they have an Office365 subscription anyway and don't want to spend $$$ on an actually good VC/Chat solution. So yes, sorry, but it's really, really hard to get excited about AI meeting notes in Teams.
> It's quite exciting that we're getting some proper applications of the technology that make sense.
The technology already makes sense, in the form of ChatGPT. I use it every day.
Because MS really needs to get their priorities straight. What good are AI meeting notes if the absolute basics of a VC/Chat software don't work properly? Just from the past few days, I've had
- Chat messages turning up hours later, or are not shown as new and I see them later by accident
- Images in chats are not loading
- In VC, I can't see people who have joined the meeting after me
- Status is stuck on "away" although I'm working with Teams
- Having to set up my audio/video setting for each new meeting again
Maybe fix these things first before working on AI meeting notes? But the fact is: many companies only use Teams because they have an Office365 subscription anyway and don't want to spend $$$ on an actually good VC/Chat solution. So yes, sorry, but it's really, really hard to get excited about AI meeting notes in Teams.
> It's quite exciting that we're getting some proper applications of the technology that make sense.
The technology already makes sense, in the form of ChatGPT. I use it every day.
> an actually good VC/Chat solution
For actually good, collaboration isn't limited to video chat. In particular, live collaboration on content is key. In an office, for office workers, turns out that's mostly Word, Excel ...
Devs don't realize this, because Git. But in office land, that was not really a solved problem. Places have nasty "Drive G" NAS solutions, with nasty permissioning management (or office gives up and gives everyone permission to everything).
Teams "Files" tab converges that, as does the Share icon, to where you're not "presenting your screen" to collaborate on the content, you can actually launch everyone's native PowerPoint or Word or Excel, see everyone's icon and cursor, and genuinely collaborate in real time on the content. Permissions are managed by Team and Channel, which make sense to everyone. Behind the scenes, all content access and permissions changes are fully audited, so the experience is fully compliant.
These things make it "actually good" for role based access to regulated compliant collaboration.
For actually good, collaboration isn't limited to video chat. In particular, live collaboration on content is key. In an office, for office workers, turns out that's mostly Word, Excel ...
Devs don't realize this, because Git. But in office land, that was not really a solved problem. Places have nasty "Drive G" NAS solutions, with nasty permissioning management (or office gives up and gives everyone permission to everything).
Teams "Files" tab converges that, as does the Share icon, to where you're not "presenting your screen" to collaborate on the content, you can actually launch everyone's native PowerPoint or Word or Excel, see everyone's icon and cursor, and genuinely collaborate in real time on the content. Permissions are managed by Team and Channel, which make sense to everyone. Behind the scenes, all content access and permissions changes are fully audited, so the experience is fully compliant.
These things make it "actually good" for role based access to regulated compliant collaboration.
100% -- The expressions "polishing a turd" or "putting lipstick on a pig" come to mind.
> "Generic Bitching"
I feel targeted. Here is some detailed complaining about Teams and why I feel a bullshit "note taker" AI is not appropriate place to put development effort.
1. It really does crash my Google Chrome window every 45 minutes to two hours. This is literally the only application that does it, so it bears mentioning.
2. It gets 2FA and security wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32337777
If you can't get 2FA correct, or enable your program to create inappropriate configurations that are going to screw up in a "serious business program", then yes, you have to fix the feature pipeline so that gets resolved first and that the process of deploying features incentivizes fixing these issues. Otherwise every new feature is just 10 new bugs.
3. It doesn't work well in languages that use IMEs
I can't tag people in chat rooms (due to it's failure to correctly search for Kanji names), and it hijacking my text input and wrecking the Japanese language input. Yes, being *unable to correctly input text* in a corporate chat application is far, far, far more important than this meaningless, worthless feature that will be used poorly 5% of the time and will be completely wrong in the language I am using anyways.
4. Note taking doesn't matter.
I can't believe that in 2023 people don't already get meeting bullet points before the meeting starts. We have our notes all on Azure Devops (which is, in comparison, tolerable)
"Nice for the note taker, awful for the productive worker" is a perfect description of Teams. This is not exciting in any way, I stand by my "generic bitching".
I feel targeted. Here is some detailed complaining about Teams and why I feel a bullshit "note taker" AI is not appropriate place to put development effort.
1. It really does crash my Google Chrome window every 45 minutes to two hours. This is literally the only application that does it, so it bears mentioning.
2. It gets 2FA and security wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32337777
If you can't get 2FA correct, or enable your program to create inappropriate configurations that are going to screw up in a "serious business program", then yes, you have to fix the feature pipeline so that gets resolved first and that the process of deploying features incentivizes fixing these issues. Otherwise every new feature is just 10 new bugs.
3. It doesn't work well in languages that use IMEs
I can't tag people in chat rooms (due to it's failure to correctly search for Kanji names), and it hijacking my text input and wrecking the Japanese language input. Yes, being *unable to correctly input text* in a corporate chat application is far, far, far more important than this meaningless, worthless feature that will be used poorly 5% of the time and will be completely wrong in the language I am using anyways.
4. Note taking doesn't matter.
I can't believe that in 2023 people don't already get meeting bullet points before the meeting starts. We have our notes all on Azure Devops (which is, in comparison, tolerable)
"Nice for the note taker, awful for the productive worker" is a perfect description of Teams. This is not exciting in any way, I stand by my "generic bitching".
I’m also thinking about the privacy side of things.
Video calls are used as a chance to talk candidly about management woes to colleagues. People talk much more freely on calls than they do in the messages of Slack or Teams.
Then auto-transcription hit, but I figured no one was going to read the thousands of lines of dialogue the org produces to mine for juicy tidbits.
Now, every meeting is automatically summarized by AI. I would not be surprised to see some 3rd party plug-in coming soon that flags to management when people express negative feelings, reveal secrets, or more on meetings.
Why have your your employees fill out some happiness Likert score when you can just do sentiment analysis on their voices? Passively determine who plans to leave, who leaked the report, and more.
Video calls are used as a chance to talk candidly about management woes to colleagues. People talk much more freely on calls than they do in the messages of Slack or Teams.
Then auto-transcription hit, but I figured no one was going to read the thousands of lines of dialogue the org produces to mine for juicy tidbits.
Now, every meeting is automatically summarized by AI. I would not be surprised to see some 3rd party plug-in coming soon that flags to management when people express negative feelings, reveal secrets, or more on meetings.
Why have your your employees fill out some happiness Likert score when you can just do sentiment analysis on their voices? Passively determine who plans to leave, who leaked the report, and more.
Yeah, there some good features in there. I've wanted automated summaries of meetings for a long time.
With more than 400 new features and improvements added to Microsoft Teams last year
Unfortunately, the only things I've seen are trivial and IMHO entirely unnecessary changes like "change the icons" or "add more useless whitespace", or something that was already widespread and possible decades ago like "now we have multiple windows". If that's what they thought were "features and improvements", it explains why Teams is still a sluggish pig that just barely works and feels repugnant to interact with.
It still greatly disappoints me that Microsoft of all companies can't write a decent native IM/AV client anymore. This AI stuff is not going to improve the basic experience either.
Unfortunately, the only things I've seen are trivial and IMHO entirely unnecessary changes like "change the icons" or "add more useless whitespace", or something that was already widespread and possible decades ago like "now we have multiple windows". If that's what they thought were "features and improvements", it explains why Teams is still a sluggish pig that just barely works and feels repugnant to interact with.
It still greatly disappoints me that Microsoft of all companies can't write a decent native IM/AV client anymore. This AI stuff is not going to improve the basic experience either.
The latest Teams update lost the ability to paste from a Teams chat message into plain text (e.g. Visual Studio Code). All the line breaks disappear.
The only way around this is to have a random Microsoft Word window, paste the Teams message into Word, and then copy from Word into Visual Studio Code.
Aaargh Microsoft! A mindbogglingly dumb regression for a 5 year old product.
The only way around this is to have a random Microsoft Word window, paste the Teams message into Word, and then copy from Word into Visual Studio Code.
Aaargh Microsoft! A mindbogglingly dumb regression for a 5 year old product.
> The only way around this is to have a random Microsoft Word window
Notepad is better and starts faster. At least the Win10 version.
Notepad is better and starts faster. At least the Win10 version.
400 "features and improvements" sounds like they just counted closed tickets. Ticket open -> couldn't reproduce -> ticket closed.
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Could someone please compete with GPT-3? This is getting ridiculous how far ahead OpenAi is getting, despite Google probably having better tech. It seems nobody else has the big brass balls of the OpenAI guys to put a large language model out there and deal with the consequences. Yann LeCun is on Twitter saying this isn't a big deal[1], but where's Facebook's LLM that's available to the public?
[1]https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1620533783702433792
[1]https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1620533783702433792
> despite Google probably having better tech
What makes you so sure? Microsoft already has a fully productized LLM that people pay for and has in turn provided real value to both users and the company (copilot). To assert that some other company has a better one but it's... not ready yet? is odd.
I can't think of the last time Google made a new product. New as in "not a reimplementation of what another company already productized", product as in "people pay for it". I don't think they have what it takes.
Edit: my bet is Google makes a free to play version that is ad supported, as they're want to do. The question is where do the ads go. The answer, most likely, is in the responses. So instead of reading the most likely continuation of a string, you get what the highest bidder wants the most likely continuation to be. Hooray.
What makes you so sure? Microsoft already has a fully productized LLM that people pay for and has in turn provided real value to both users and the company (copilot). To assert that some other company has a better one but it's... not ready yet? is odd.
I can't think of the last time Google made a new product. New as in "not a reimplementation of what another company already productized", product as in "people pay for it". I don't think they have what it takes.
Edit: my bet is Google makes a free to play version that is ad supported, as they're want to do. The question is where do the ads go. The answer, most likely, is in the responses. So instead of reading the most likely continuation of a string, you get what the highest bidder wants the most likely continuation to be. Hooray.
You hit the nail on the head. Google’s problem is business model, not technology. They need you to not know things so their advertisers can pay to inform you. A high quality LLM is exactly the opposite of what works for Google and their advertisers.
I think Google has three choices: 1) reorient their business model to be about making money by providing direct value to the user, 2) pivot to be about ad-supported entertainment rather than productivity/information, or 3) cut costs, run as a cash cow, throw off as much profit as possible before obselesence.
I think Google has three choices: 1) reorient their business model to be about making money by providing direct value to the user, 2) pivot to be about ad-supported entertainment rather than productivity/information, or 3) cut costs, run as a cash cow, throw off as much profit as possible before obselesence.
You can buy flight tickets from Google, that is a relatively new product even if you buy them from the search result. So Google search is good at adding new products that are context sensitive to your query, I don't see why they couldn't make such things with a chat bot answering question queries instead of just trying to link to sites with answers.
> a chat bot answering question queries instead of just trying to link to sites with answers
And kill their golden goose? Google makes more money the longer you spend on their ad-ridden search result pages. I don't doubt they'll make a question answering bot, but the real question is how they fund it (see edit above for my guess).
And kill their golden goose? Google makes more money the longer you spend on their ad-ridden search result pages. I don't doubt they'll make a question answering bot, but the real question is how they fund it (see edit above for my guess).
A ChatGPT-like AI that's answering your question in the context of your recent search and browsing history can make a pretty darn sophisticated guess about what ads you might be primed to see.
But deploying something like that at scale not only means developing the consumer experience but also the ad placement platform that generates optimal revenue from it. It's not a thing to toss over the wall just because ChatGPT won some news cycles.
But deploying something like that at scale not only means developing the consumer experience but also the ad placement platform that generates optimal revenue from it. It's not a thing to toss over the wall just because ChatGPT won some news cycles.
> Google makes more money the longer you spend on their ad-ridden search result pages.
So why not keep people there by having an engaging chat bot? Could even refresh and add new context sensitive ads every time you ask something new.
So why not keep people there by having an engaging chat bot? Could even refresh and add new context sensitive ads every time you ask something new.
> And kill their golden goose?
Someone will kill their golden goose sooner or later. It's better if they kill it themselves and silently replace it with something else.
Someone will kill their golden goose sooner or later. It's better if they kill it themselves and silently replace it with something else.
Maybe while you ask questions to ChatLaMDA, it could also show a sidebar of relevant web pages mixed with AdWords results related to your questions.
Although clicking on them might not be quite as natural as clicking as part of search results, so still massive damage to the golden goose.
Although clicking on them might not be quite as natural as clicking as part of search results, so still massive damage to the golden goose.
> Google makes more money the longer you spend on their ad-ridden search result pages.
Chat bots also can very naturally embed advertisement:
btw, I think you would really love to check this related product which according to many reviews can help with the problem you just asked me about.
Chat bots also can very naturally embed advertisement:
btw, I think you would really love to check this related product which according to many reviews can help with the problem you just asked me about.
There's no rush. This space is so immature and yet so plainly ripe that there's little benefit to being first. Leapfrogging with matured market insight is where the big winners live.
OpenAI will have a secure home with Microsoft, but aren't positioned to run away with anything anytime soon. They're at least as likely to be the Altavista to Google Search, the Napster to Spotify, the MySpace to Facebook, etc
OpenAI will have a secure home with Microsoft, but aren't positioned to run away with anything anytime soon. They're at least as likely to be the Altavista to Google Search, the Napster to Spotify, the MySpace to Facebook, etc
It's easy to look like you're "ahead" by constantly releasing shiny new things that aren't actually profitable.
Until OpenAI is generating billions in profit, I wouldn't be so quick to criticize the other big companies. Google in particular has a reputation[0] to defend - they're not going to risk their cash cow with a half-cocked LLM that spouts patent falsehoods half the time. Not to mention the false economics of losing money on every single search.
[0] - the reputation might be sullied amongst the HN crowd, but they're negligible when it comes to dominance of Google as a search engine for normies.
Until OpenAI is generating billions in profit, I wouldn't be so quick to criticize the other big companies. Google in particular has a reputation[0] to defend - they're not going to risk their cash cow with a half-cocked LLM that spouts patent falsehoods half the time. Not to mention the false economics of losing money on every single search.
[0] - the reputation might be sullied amongst the HN crowd, but they're negligible when it comes to dominance of Google as a search engine for normies.
"but where's Facebook's LLM that's available to the public"
They are trying it, here:
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-s...
Demo:
https://opt.alpa.ai/
But it's clearly not as good as GPT3.5
They are trying it, here:
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-s...
Demo:
https://opt.alpa.ai/
But it's clearly not as good as GPT3.5
> where's Facebook's LLM that's available to the public?
https://blenderbot.ai/
https://blenderbot.ai/
The response quality of BlenderBot is pretty bad compared to ChatGPT
Example question: What’s a covariance matrix?
BlenderBot: Principal component analysis is a popular technique for analyzing large datasets containing a high number of dimensions/features per observation, increasing the interpretability of data while preserving the maximum amount of information, and enabling the visualization of multidimensional data.
ChatGPT: A covariance matrix is a symmetric matrix that describes the covariance between multiple variables in a given dataset. The diagonal elements of the matrix represent the variance of each variable, and the off-diagonal elements represent the covariance between each pair of variables. The covariance matrix is used in multivariate statistics to understand the relationships between different variables and to perform statistical inference and hypothesis testing.
Example question: What’s a covariance matrix?
BlenderBot: Principal component analysis is a popular technique for analyzing large datasets containing a high number of dimensions/features per observation, increasing the interpretability of data while preserving the maximum amount of information, and enabling the visualization of multidimensional data.
ChatGPT: A covariance matrix is a symmetric matrix that describes the covariance between multiple variables in a given dataset. The diagonal elements of the matrix represent the variance of each variable, and the off-diagonal elements represent the covariance between each pair of variables. The covariance matrix is used in multivariate statistics to understand the relationships between different variables and to perform statistical inference and hypothesis testing.
I tried it. It can't answer basic encyclopedia facts (e.g How many people died in World War II). It can't do basic programming (e.g write a javascript function to reverse a string). Just goes to show that everyone besides OpenAI are so terrified of these things that they can only release versions that are toys.
Do these companies fear their customers that much? Maybe that's the difference between Microsoft/OpenAI and Facebook/Google. Microsoft sells the LLM to the customer who will be more impressed by the product if it's useful. With Facebook/Google the product uses the LLM. The LLM may make them an unsuitable product if they don't click on an ad after using it.
Do these companies fear their customers that much? Maybe that's the difference between Microsoft/OpenAI and Facebook/Google. Microsoft sells the LLM to the customer who will be more impressed by the product if it's useful. With Facebook/Google the product uses the LLM. The LLM may make them an unsuitable product if they don't click on an ad after using it.
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Personally, I'm very much looking forward to absolutely hilarious meeting notes. I work at a company with local branches in France and GB, and with lots and lots of expats from all over the world, so many people have pretty strong accents. Whenever I'm bored in a meeting, I turn on transcription and usually get a good chuckle out of it. I can't wait to see what ChatGPT will generate with this.
Also, I'm really wondering: How will ChatGPT deal with the typical banter that often happens in meetings? Will I get meeting notes about whether Messi or Ronaldo is the greater player? What about gossip that a human would never put in a meeting note? Will the department X be happy to read that they never get things done in time because person Y usually has a hangover on Mondays? The future will be exciting!
Also, I'm really wondering: How will ChatGPT deal with the typical banter that often happens in meetings? Will I get meeting notes about whether Messi or Ronaldo is the greater player? What about gossip that a human would never put in a meeting note? Will the department X be happy to read that they never get things done in time because person Y usually has a hangover on Mondays? The future will be exciting!
I wish they would push the calling aspect of Microsoft Teams more. The technology is great:
1. Receive business calls from anywhere and any handset or computer. Seamlessly transfer and pick up the call on any device. Can be linked to inbound 1800, 1300 numbers, landline numbers, etc.
2. Can do call forwarding, ring-out forwarding, and voice messages
3. Voice messages are recorded, transcripted and the audio file and text transcript emailed to you. In many cases you don't even need to listen to the audio
4. Users can have their own inbound phone numbers (!) and outbound phone numbers (!) and i.e. push these automatically into email signatures, all centrally managed from Microsoft 365 Admin
5. Teams Desk phones require just an ethernet connection to work, don't require any SIP HW or configuration, and can be hotdesked in a few seconds
But the real issue is that the commercialization of it was poor. Microsoft outsourced the phone switchboard part to third party providers/resellers of the Teams calling packs, and these are usually small to medium SMB that operate like used car salesman and have stupid pricing models, i.e. minimum 10 phone numbers or users (in Australia, anyway) or sell you like four differently named confusing calling packs and addons that nobody can understand.
In the case of Telstra, they wanted $5000 (!!) for a consultant to setup a $10/user/mo Teams calling plan and wouldn't let us take out an account without going through a setup consultant. Similarly, another big telco we talked to required a minimum order of around $200/mo. For goodness sake, it's a SaaS, you should be able to just go online and order it without talking to anyone. A novel product and great idea, with truly poor commercialization and ZERO regulation of their partner network and their allowed pricing models.
1. Receive business calls from anywhere and any handset or computer. Seamlessly transfer and pick up the call on any device. Can be linked to inbound 1800, 1300 numbers, landline numbers, etc.
2. Can do call forwarding, ring-out forwarding, and voice messages
3. Voice messages are recorded, transcripted and the audio file and text transcript emailed to you. In many cases you don't even need to listen to the audio
4. Users can have their own inbound phone numbers (!) and outbound phone numbers (!) and i.e. push these automatically into email signatures, all centrally managed from Microsoft 365 Admin
5. Teams Desk phones require just an ethernet connection to work, don't require any SIP HW or configuration, and can be hotdesked in a few seconds
But the real issue is that the commercialization of it was poor. Microsoft outsourced the phone switchboard part to third party providers/resellers of the Teams calling packs, and these are usually small to medium SMB that operate like used car salesman and have stupid pricing models, i.e. minimum 10 phone numbers or users (in Australia, anyway) or sell you like four differently named confusing calling packs and addons that nobody can understand.
In the case of Telstra, they wanted $5000 (!!) for a consultant to setup a $10/user/mo Teams calling plan and wouldn't let us take out an account without going through a setup consultant. Similarly, another big telco we talked to required a minimum order of around $200/mo. For goodness sake, it's a SaaS, you should be able to just go online and order it without talking to anyone. A novel product and great idea, with truly poor commercialization and ZERO regulation of their partner network and their allowed pricing models.
From my experience you don't necessarily need to use a third party VoIP provider unless you need coexistence with your existing phone system.
My team have an allocated Microsoft provided number which is allocated via the Teams admin centre which is easy to manage and we can just order more numbers if required.
My team have an allocated Microsoft provided number which is allocated via the Teams admin centre which is easy to manage and we can just order more numbers if required.
I think that this is part of the confusing way they sell it. You can use outbound Microsoft numbers (similar to how Skype calling used to work), but if you want inbound numbers I think you need a third party telco?
These products form the Calling Pack (Microsoft) and the Voice Service (Telco) respectively, and then on top of that you need some kind of bridge (Telco) if you want to have a 13 or 18 number.
And if you want to have your outbound number recognisable as your inbound number, that’s another aspect of the Voice Service that needs to be configured.
Unfortunately the latter infrastructure doesn’t live at MS and it can be really unreliable if the telco hosting it is small. Our phone goes down for around an hour once a week or so.
These products form the Calling Pack (Microsoft) and the Voice Service (Telco) respectively, and then on top of that you need some kind of bridge (Telco) if you want to have a 13 or 18 number.
And if you want to have your outbound number recognisable as your inbound number, that’s another aspect of the Voice Service that needs to be configured.
Unfortunately the latter infrastructure doesn’t live at MS and it can be really unreliable if the telco hosting it is small. Our phone goes down for around an hour once a week or so.
Calls are the one thing Teams does well (and it does them really well), IMO. Everything else is quirky, but calls just work.
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Will this "premium" version include fixes for all the obvious and terrible bugs people keep complaining about? They're barely acceptable for a free product.
If they can spend billions on AI maybe they can assign like ONE person to caring about Teams??
If they can spend billions on AI maybe they can assign like ONE person to caring about Teams??
Look at the history of past Microsoft chat products... and then name one they didn't run slowly into the ground and then replace with something else!
- MSN Messenger
- Windows Live Messenger
- Microsoft Office Communications
- Microsoft V-Chat
- Microsoft Lync
- Skype
- Skype for Business (nothing to do with Skype - completely different software)
- Microsoft Classroom
- Windows Meeting Space
- Microsoft NetMeeting
- Microsoft Office Live Meeting
etc.
Why would you expect Teams to fare differently?
- MSN Messenger
- Windows Live Messenger
- Microsoft Office Communications
- Microsoft V-Chat
- Microsoft Lync
- Skype
- Skype for Business (nothing to do with Skype - completely different software)
- Microsoft Classroom
- Windows Meeting Space
- Microsoft NetMeeting
- Microsoft Office Live Meeting
etc.
Why would you expect Teams to fare differently?
MSN Messenger was great and significantly better than the abomination that is Teams. Was Teams ever good?
There definitely was a point when I thought that, yes, this is a new product and it is looking good, give it another year or so to get the kinks out. But then they removed features they got right the first time, like fullscreen screen sharing with their New Experience. They also added more and more half-baked poducts with rapidly changing apis and the like. From then on I was convinced that they in fact didn't want to learn what Slack/Discord/etc. did right and just go their usual MS way.
MSN Messenger was good for a short period, then got increasingly bloated and horrible and I had to switch to alternative clients like Trillian. I remember someone released a hacked version of Messenger with all the bloat stripped out, too.
I see what you mean though. I don't remember Teams ever being good.
I see what you mean though. I don't remember Teams ever being good.
Can they get gpt-3 to program a version of Teams that works?
To anyone fortunate to not have to use Teams, this is no joke - it's mind-bogglingly terrible. But I have noticed some unintentional humor, if I send a message like "ok, this isn't working, why don't I Slack you a Zoom link instead?" I get an immediate modal popping up, asking if I would answer two quick questions...
It’s quite literally a daily event where someone in a call will say “sorry, my teams is bugged out, I can’t see you” or some other bug of the day. A coworker keeps a log of every teams bug he sees which is enormous.
It’s not even weird edge cases. The core features like calls just flat out don’t work in random ways.
It’s not even weird edge cases. The core features like calls just flat out don’t work in random ways.
Forget calls.
There's been a recent update that managed to break the chat screen even more than before (when it was "only" slow).
Roughly half the time I start teams, the chat window will be empty. It's just gray. It doesn't look like it's loading with empty bubbles or similar, it just sits there doing nothing and being completely empty.
I can change contacts, the heading updates, but there just are no messages showing up. I can change tabs, like going to activity, calendar, or teams (where messages do show up), when I get back to the chats, no contents.
Of course, this being Microsoft, a restart seems to fix it right up.
There's been a recent update that managed to break the chat screen even more than before (when it was "only" slow).
Roughly half the time I start teams, the chat window will be empty. It's just gray. It doesn't look like it's loading with empty bubbles or similar, it just sits there doing nothing and being completely empty.
I can change contacts, the heading updates, but there just are no messages showing up. I can change tabs, like going to activity, calendar, or teams (where messages do show up), when I get back to the chats, no contents.
Of course, this being Microsoft, a restart seems to fix it right up.
Yeah, but if the teams developers had been fixing those bugs, they wouldn’t have been able to build this AI-powered teams premium. /s
As a daily user of teams it’s pretty obvious that the way teams is built is not informed by UX experts or user feedback, and mostly is focused on checking off as many boxes as possible to sell the product to C-level. It has a bewildering set of features, and they’re usually either kind of broken or kind of hard to use, or both.
But I have no doubt they’re eating slack’s lunch, for the same reason my employer switched from slack to teams: convenient licensing, bundling and deployment.
As a daily user of teams it’s pretty obvious that the way teams is built is not informed by UX experts or user feedback, and mostly is focused on checking off as many boxes as possible to sell the product to C-level. It has a bewildering set of features, and they’re usually either kind of broken or kind of hard to use, or both.
But I have no doubt they’re eating slack’s lunch, for the same reason my employer switched from slack to teams: convenient licensing, bundling and deployment.
Deployment in particular, in my (limited) experience. We had to deploy Slack and I was amazed that there was no way of configuring it via Group Policy or such. It had to be done manually on each machine. Madness.
Then Microsoft foisted Teams on us and we had to waste time finding ways to disable it.
In the end, I’m not sure which I hate more. Slack is also a dog-slow JavaScript app, so at least in that sense, they are one as bad as the other.
Then Microsoft foisted Teams on us and we had to waste time finding ways to disable it.
In the end, I’m not sure which I hate more. Slack is also a dog-slow JavaScript app, so at least in that sense, they are one as bad as the other.
Maybe they're going to rewrite Teams with code written by GPT? It would probably be a massive improvement over what they have now.
Teams is one of those things that feels like we should have solved this like 10 years ago.
Same thing with online payment systems - how is it that we didn't have that stuff completely solved like 20 years ago?
I mean I know the answer deep down but seriously - Some folks did solve it, a lot did not or don't want to. Can't keep a job on a complete software package.
Same thing with online payment systems - how is it that we didn't have that stuff completely solved like 20 years ago?
I mean I know the answer deep down but seriously - Some folks did solve it, a lot did not or don't want to. Can't keep a job on a complete software package.
No it isn't; Teams is one of those things that Linux users think is IRC because they don't understand Microsoft's offerings and why companies pay a lot of money for them.
Teams is not primarily a chat client, it's one of many front ends for Microsoft Office 365 (now M365). It's backed by SharePoint, you can share documents through Teams which are also available in Explorer through OneDrive, in the web through your Microsoft account login, on mobile through Microsoft apps, and you can edit them in the Office classic interface, in a web browser, or in the Teams interface, while other people are editing them.
Teams is backed by the Microsoft Graph which yes makes it so you can add chatbots to Teams channels, but also means you can add listeners and webhooks from events that happen in your company, e.g. when someone in Microsoft Planner makes a task it can update a Team channel, or when someone
Teams is a voice and video chat like Zoom but it's backed by the Active Directory permissions, and that means you can federate with other organisations and allow calls internal/outbound but only to linked organisations. It's tied to LinkedIn (which Microsoft own) for contact lookup and user directory seraching.
Teams is backed by Microsoft Azure features, even before this GPT announcement, for transcription and recording and upload.
Teams integrates with Office so that when your status changes, that shows up in Outlook for people trying to email you, or in Outlook you can make a 'new Teams meeting' from the same interface as making any other meeting, and Teams meetings show up on your calendar, but it's a calendar in M365 not on your desktop so you can go the other way and see your calendar in the Teams interface and join Teams calls from there.
From inside Teams' client, as well as searching chat history, the search finds people in your organisation and shows you organisation structure, who reports to whom.
Teams has a plugin architecture / app store inside it, for adding things like Wikipedia search.
Teams is scriptable through the same Azure / Graph API as all the other Microsoft Cloud systems, and manageable through the same web interface, with the ability to set permissions on which admin teams can enable/disable which Teams features.
And all of this has the UX that a company of non-tech people are used to - Microsoft Office, Windows - and that a large company with Microsoft offerings is already managing through web management.
Nobody is hooking Zoom up so that someone editing a spreadsheet in Excel on their desktop and someone editing a spreadsheet in Zoom chat are both collaboratively editing the same file at the same time live. Nobody is hooking IRC up so you can see sharepoint libraries in it. Is anybody hooking Slack up to be an app store that connects into your existing Microsoft ecosystem so departments can build workflows from PowerBI over SharePoint documents to Slack? So that the Microsoft Bing search that you get by default in Edge logged in with your company Microsoft account also searches your Slack chat history and surfaces results in the same window as the web results and search results for all other company documents you have permission to access?
Microsoft is building / has built the walled garden lockin of the next decade or more, and it's compelling despite parts of it being sub-par or having poor UX, because the user is the organization not the individual, and the benefit is more than the sum of its parts. The MS Office lockin is history, OpenOffice isn't even playing the same game.
Teams is not primarily a chat client, it's one of many front ends for Microsoft Office 365 (now M365). It's backed by SharePoint, you can share documents through Teams which are also available in Explorer through OneDrive, in the web through your Microsoft account login, on mobile through Microsoft apps, and you can edit them in the Office classic interface, in a web browser, or in the Teams interface, while other people are editing them.
Teams is backed by the Microsoft Graph which yes makes it so you can add chatbots to Teams channels, but also means you can add listeners and webhooks from events that happen in your company, e.g. when someone in Microsoft Planner makes a task it can update a Team channel, or when someone
Teams is a voice and video chat like Zoom but it's backed by the Active Directory permissions, and that means you can federate with other organisations and allow calls internal/outbound but only to linked organisations. It's tied to LinkedIn (which Microsoft own) for contact lookup and user directory seraching.
Teams is backed by Microsoft Azure features, even before this GPT announcement, for transcription and recording and upload.
Teams integrates with Office so that when your status changes, that shows up in Outlook for people trying to email you, or in Outlook you can make a 'new Teams meeting' from the same interface as making any other meeting, and Teams meetings show up on your calendar, but it's a calendar in M365 not on your desktop so you can go the other way and see your calendar in the Teams interface and join Teams calls from there.
From inside Teams' client, as well as searching chat history, the search finds people in your organisation and shows you organisation structure, who reports to whom.
Teams has a plugin architecture / app store inside it, for adding things like Wikipedia search.
Teams is scriptable through the same Azure / Graph API as all the other Microsoft Cloud systems, and manageable through the same web interface, with the ability to set permissions on which admin teams can enable/disable which Teams features.
And all of this has the UX that a company of non-tech people are used to - Microsoft Office, Windows - and that a large company with Microsoft offerings is already managing through web management.
Nobody is hooking Zoom up so that someone editing a spreadsheet in Excel on their desktop and someone editing a spreadsheet in Zoom chat are both collaboratively editing the same file at the same time live. Nobody is hooking IRC up so you can see sharepoint libraries in it. Is anybody hooking Slack up to be an app store that connects into your existing Microsoft ecosystem so departments can build workflows from PowerBI over SharePoint documents to Slack? So that the Microsoft Bing search that you get by default in Edge logged in with your company Microsoft account also searches your Slack chat history and surfaces results in the same window as the web results and search results for all other company documents you have permission to access?
Microsoft is building / has built the walled garden lockin of the next decade or more, and it's compelling despite parts of it being sub-par or having poor UX, because the user is the organization not the individual, and the benefit is more than the sum of its parts. The MS Office lockin is history, OpenOffice isn't even playing the same game.
Yup, this is it, this is the real life version of the beginning of the Manna story.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
He didn't anticipate that AI would require a huge amount of processing power and that AI safety would be such a huge problem.
Amazing this book is from 2003 - very prescient.
> Version 4.0 of Manna was also the first version to enforce average task times, and that was even worse. Manna would ask you to clean the restrooms. But now Manna had industry-average times for restroom cleaning stored in the software, as well as “target times”. If it took you too long to mop the floor or clean the sinks, Manna would say to you, “lagging”. When you said, “OK” to mark task completion for Manna, Manna would say, “Your time was 4 minutes 10 seconds. Industry average time is 3 minutes 30 seconds. Please focus on each task.” Anyone who lagged consistently was fired.
Feels like Amazon took some inspiration from that.
Feels like Amazon took some inspiration from that.
ai and neural networks aren't needed for this sort of work metric monitoring. You'd have found this in factories decades ago.
The situation that is described in Manna is merely something that would occur under complete free market capitalism, and assumes that people would not change or adapt to meet the challenges of automation.
The situation that is described in Manna is merely something that would occur under complete free market capitalism, and assumes that people would not change or adapt to meet the challenges of automation.
An AI listening in and evaluating all my meetings? No thanks. I have now switched all meetings with my reports to my Nextcloud Talk server.
> An AI listening in and evaluating all my meetings?
How is that different than a co-worker/manager/HR?
How is that different than a co-worker/manager/HR?
The people in the meeting were invited. They have limited memory. They have respect for each other and only share as appropriate. They are not logging everything said to people's dossiers to be used for other purposes.
One is a human, the other is some AI hoovering up everything I say an adding it to their database which can be used in every other instance of Teams in the world. I'd say that's a meaningful difference.
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The premium feature I would like is to automatically blur private chat messages and e-mails when sharing your screen. The number of times i have seen information leakage because someone is sharing their whole desktop grows every week. It needs a technological solution to it.
Can they just start by getting it to hold the setting for a default microphone/audio output?
That requires AGI so unfortunately we are not there yet. But the future holds promise.
Just putting it out there, ChatGPT is not even AI.
The premium version of Teams would be one with:
- Better UX. When working with Slack/Discord or any other of these apps. Going back to Teams is painful.
- That does not drain my Iphones battery as much as watching 4 hours on youtube.
- Better UX. When working with Slack/Discord or any other of these apps. Going back to Teams is painful.
- That does not drain my Iphones battery as much as watching 4 hours on youtube.
> Microsoft Teams Premium: powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5
They shall power Teams with some people to design an UI and fix the bugs. It is the worst piece of software i ever used.
They shall power Teams with some people to design an UI and fix the bugs. It is the worst piece of software i ever used.
We're definitely living through a William Gibson book now.
Meetings summaries are cool I guess, but it's about the least interesting thing you could do with gpt and Microsoft's software suite. And at $10/user/month?
Put it in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, GitHub, generate Excel formulas, let me design power automate flows, or power query m stuff for powerbi, let me datamine the company SharePoint/OneDrive.
Put it in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, GitHub, generate Excel formulas, let me design power automate flows, or power query m stuff for powerbi, let me datamine the company SharePoint/OneDrive.
"With intelligent recap in Teams premium, you’ll get automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights to help you get the information most important to you, even if you miss the meeting."
There are some startups working on these solutions too right?
There are some startups working on these solutions too right?
I saw two on HN yesterday: https://www.metaview.ai/ and https://www.meetjamie.ai/.
Yes. That was initially my idea for a hackathon. Kinda glad I didn't see it through.
Oof. I guess it's hard if your product is a feature.
If you train an AI on enough Teams meetings, it will probably eventually generate the lyrics to "Mission Statement": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
Let those bots talk to each other and give us humans the summary.
Great, now I have to read a bots meeting notes to confirm "that's what I meant".
Teams has had transcription for ages, and the transcription indexed into your company's M365 search: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cloud-recor...
Yeah, but if you don't have the standard Midwestern Accent, you're fucked. As an Australian I'd estimate that ~70% of everything has an error in the transcription.
It will probably take a true AGI for Microsoft to fix their awful buggy Teams client.
I really wonder what’s happening at all the video/audio call intelligence startups that raised over the last few years [1][2][3]. I would pay to be a fly on the wall during their strategy meetings this morning.
I guess another footnote in the history books for Microsoft decimating a recently emerged biz niche.
[1] Airgram - https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/otter-ai-airgram-transcrib...
[2] OtterAI - https://venturebeat.com/business/otter-ai-raises-50-million-...
[3] Supernormal - https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/25/supernormal-raises-10m-to-...
I guess another footnote in the history books for Microsoft decimating a recently emerged biz niche.
[1] Airgram - https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/otter-ai-airgram-transcrib...
[2] OtterAI - https://venturebeat.com/business/otter-ai-raises-50-million-...
[3] Supernormal - https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/25/supernormal-raises-10m-to-...
I hope this puts pressure on Google for adding intelligence features to Meet!
I hope it does not. I don't want to see these features. Microsoft Teams barely runs, nd barely lets me join a meeting
Almost all of these look like backend features that feed AI summarized or generated data. So they probably won’t hurt client performance.
right?
As big a fan as I am of GPT3, the idea of it as a shiny new toy for the meeting-class to ensure those of us who attend grudgingly because we like to - you know - get things done are now going to have the joys of Clippy-as-Hall-Monitor helpfully guiding us through every minute of the meeting we managed to dip out on is not appealing.
Can I just pay for chatgpt to take an entire meeting for me instead?
Microsoft is desperate to monetize Teams separately from the M365 license because of how expensive it is to operate. Initially they were chasing the platform app store route but that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. This is their second attempt.
They are definitely making money of Microsoft Teams Voice and Teams Phone System...
So just feed autogenerated text from a video into ChatGPT and ask it to summerize.
Have meeting transcripts been used to train LLMs? How long until AI Chatbots participate in meetings? Corporate, department, industry or employee-owned LLMs? https://twitter.com/migueldeicaza/status/1620915691133243394
> To impress your peers, and get a promotion, show that you care about the process, and sound smart, but without repeating what was said, you say:
> To impress your peers, and get a promotion, show that you care about the process, and sound smart, but without repeating what was said, you say:
Now we need all the toxic people automatically flagged and fired.
Or even better... moderate people by cutting off their mic: "Please stay on topic", "Don't interrupt others", "Don't ignore other participants", "Please answer the question", etc.
An AI meeting moderator would make work so much better.
Or even better... moderate people by cutting off their mic: "Please stay on topic", "Don't interrupt others", "Don't ignore other participants", "Please answer the question", etc.
An AI meeting moderator would make work so much better.
This is a joke, right?
I initially read it as a joke, but now I'm not sure...
No, it's not. Some people truly need it.
The status quo is a joke. The threshold for considering behavior toxic is too high.
Now we have the technology to end the bullshit.
If you are interrupting, ignoring others, bluffing, lying, manipulating, gaslighting, being a sycophant, playing dirty... you are no longer playing the game. There are ways of achieving things that do not involve cheating.
If you disagree, then I have to ask you: are you really being collaborative and inclusive, working for a common goal, or you are simply being selectively inclusive and collaborative up to the point it's time to sabotage others?
There are people out there that get ahead by being irrational, selfish and overall horrible. Let's get them out of the way and let the best ideas win.
The status quo is a joke. The threshold for considering behavior toxic is too high.
Now we have the technology to end the bullshit.
If you are interrupting, ignoring others, bluffing, lying, manipulating, gaslighting, being a sycophant, playing dirty... you are no longer playing the game. There are ways of achieving things that do not involve cheating.
If you disagree, then I have to ask you: are you really being collaborative and inclusive, working for a common goal, or you are simply being selectively inclusive and collaborative up to the point it's time to sabotage others?
There are people out there that get ahead by being irrational, selfish and overall horrible. Let's get them out of the way and let the best ideas win.
Very dystopian. It works well as farce, if it were one.
Human intelligence is tainted with lower forms of intelligence from less evolved animals. The brain is structurally a monolith where structures responsible for advanced cognitive brain functions are built on top of older brain structures from millions of years prior.
Primitive animals are less social, less collaborative and cannot collaborate in large groups. There are vestigial behaviors from them that arise once in a while in humans. It's time to evolve and press the mute button on lower ape behavior. Humans cannot do it reliably.
Automatically detecting and flagging selfish individuals that cannot work in groups and actively sabotage their group by preventing the best ideas from prevailing is something worth trying.
The reason everyone is seeing therapists is because some people are determined to ruin the work experience for others. We can do better.
Primitive animals are less social, less collaborative and cannot collaborate in large groups. There are vestigial behaviors from them that arise once in a while in humans. It's time to evolve and press the mute button on lower ape behavior. Humans cannot do it reliably.
Automatically detecting and flagging selfish individuals that cannot work in groups and actively sabotage their group by preventing the best ideas from prevailing is something worth trying.
The reason everyone is seeing therapists is because some people are determined to ruin the work experience for others. We can do better.
You’re proposing that an imperfect AI flags (ok) or fires (wow) employees based on potentially bad input.
Same thing on muting mic or doing any kind of auto moderation.
That’s going very far on an imperfect technology. I’d sooner bet on autonomous driving than people using such a moderator.
Same thing on muting mic or doing any kind of auto moderation.
That’s going very far on an imperfect technology. I’d sooner bet on autonomous driving than people using such a moderator.
No, it's not.
We already employ profanity filters in multiplayer games. We also have rating systems in games that allow peers to flag toxic behavior after a game session for review. These have helped limiting the harm caused by toxic players.
Those are simple low tech solutions that could be added to videoconferencing applications.
Did someone act toxic during a meeting? Allow participants to report a toxic interaction, with an AI generated transcript + recording.
Then you can go one step further and build the future of HR playbook enforcement:
"Meeting participant #1234, you are engaging in toxic behavior and are in direct violation of the HR playbook page 113 section 9: please stop disrupting the meeting and shut the hell up to avoid disciplinary action. You have 10 seconds to comply. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...". /s
But jokes aside... Today we have great sentiment analysis capabilities. There is a subset of the English language you should never use at work. We can also detect if someone is yelling. We can flag highly offensive terms. There are ways in which we can apply technology in a sensible way to improve the work experience, to limit the harm caused by the worst types of behaviors including but not limited to violence.
We can also use technology to hold HR accountable to enforce the HR playbook.
We already employ profanity filters in multiplayer games. We also have rating systems in games that allow peers to flag toxic behavior after a game session for review. These have helped limiting the harm caused by toxic players.
Those are simple low tech solutions that could be added to videoconferencing applications.
Did someone act toxic during a meeting? Allow participants to report a toxic interaction, with an AI generated transcript + recording.
Then you can go one step further and build the future of HR playbook enforcement:
"Meeting participant #1234, you are engaging in toxic behavior and are in direct violation of the HR playbook page 113 section 9: please stop disrupting the meeting and shut the hell up to avoid disciplinary action. You have 10 seconds to comply. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...". /s
But jokes aside... Today we have great sentiment analysis capabilities. There is a subset of the English language you should never use at work. We can also detect if someone is yelling. We can flag highly offensive terms. There are ways in which we can apply technology in a sensible way to improve the work experience, to limit the harm caused by the worst types of behaviors including but not limited to violence.
We can also use technology to hold HR accountable to enforce the HR playbook.
I guess when we get to have AGI agents, they will start replacing HR, even though I doubt this will sit well with anyone. Again, it’s dystopian. Maybe in a Demolition Man world.
But today? Wew
But today? Wew
Some stuff can be classified as toxic and universally unacceptable with high confidence. That is the low hanging fruit we can begin with.
A reputation system with user submitted information can also help.
A reputation system with user submitted information can also help.
I don't need some half-baked language model to stand up for myself. Thanks, though.
You don't? what if you were an H-1B that, in the event of termination, has a grace period of 60 days to find a job. In an at-will employment company?
Then you would think 1000 times before saying anything that can get you marked for termination.
Then you would think 1000 times before saying anything that can get you marked for termination.
What in tarnation
Every time a company like Microsoft or Facebook talks about how my messages are E2EE inside of their app I always read: "Now only we and you can read your messages, no one else."
What's the point of E2EE if you can't be sure that the decrypting app isn't sending your data elsewhere?
What's the point of E2EE if you can't be sure that the decrypting app isn't sending your data elsewhere?
I hate Teams as much as the next guy but markers to see which people spoke when in the recording sound cool. It's also something that would have been possible to make even in the 90s (teams knows which microphone was active so no need for AI) so hopefully they won't mess it up
Why is it not a security concern to more companies that Microsoft is watching and recording all their meetings? I guess it is like selling on Amazon: You are fine until when Amazon wants to capitalize on your data or your entire business.
Microsoft Teams is a good Slack-like software. The UI is much more conducive to threads by default, which is an excellent choice. Had lots of issues with video calls being unreliable pre-covid, and our company eventually abandoned it.
Gong has had these meeting feaures. I'm curious if GPT-3.5 leapfrogs it.
I see a great use case of it. we can schedule product training sessions on teams and it will generate notes.. all the knowledge will be documented too.
My organisation sends a backup zoom link because teams is so terrible. Who knows why they even stick with teams default
Would love to try this, it would get so confused in our technical meetings that use internal code words and obscure jargon.
Salesforce, SAP, AWS and Google about to get leapfrogged.. If they buy Notion - endgame. Microsoft is our new overlords.
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2 questions:
- Is it still electron-based?
- Is the Linux version (assuming it even exists) still a 2nd class citizen?
- Is it still electron-based?
- Is the Linux version (assuming it even exists) still a 2nd class citizen?
>> With more than 400 new features and improvements
That is a lot but MS Teams lacks one key feature that only Zoom/WebEx type tools have - the ability to pause the screen-sharing. It is strange that even Google meet doesn't have that feature.
Sharing pause is quite helpful when doing external meetings.
That is a lot but MS Teams lacks one key feature that only Zoom/WebEx type tools have - the ability to pause the screen-sharing. It is strange that even Google meet doesn't have that feature.
Sharing pause is quite helpful when doing external meetings.
Oh, it's so "Open".
automatic notes captured out of meetings ... I don't know if I want that.
This refers to the meeting join link and the last time someone sent me a link like this it was not a delightful experience. I ended up mixing up organisations and accounts.
An example of a good experience is joining a Jitsi Meet meeting because you don’t have to sign up or do anything to join (my comment is on the join experience only). It remains standalone and does not try to link you to anything. There is no time to mess around when joining a meeting.