Microsoft Teams: To Mute or Unmute?

12/04/23

It happens to me a few times a week when I am on a Microsoft Teams meeting and someone is on mute and must be told to unmute themselves. Or the even worse of scenarios, someone is speaking and there is a dog barking and kids screaming because someone forgot to put themselves on mute when they were not speaking. Making sure your mic is muted or unmuted on a Teams meeting could soon be a lot simpler thanks to a new update.

Microsoft has revealed it is working on a new feature that will allow users to mute and unmute their audio by just clicking the mic icon in the Windows taskbar. This should help make sure your mic is not accidentally on when it should not be, but still beware of that accidental click!

In its entry on the official Microsoft 365 roadmap, Microsoft states “control your mic state during meetings” is noted as only being available in the new Teams for Windows experience, currently on offer to desktop users on Windows only.

The roadmap also mentioned a major AI update thanks to Microsoft Copilot. It is gaining the ability to not just be able to summarize and write up meeting notes, but also draw them using the company’s Microsoft Whiteboard platform.

Copilot will continue to be able to take notes throughout a meeting, before creating and sharing summaries with users at the end. What is new is “Collaborative notes” which automatically takes live notes so that users can focus on the meeting.

Outside of a meeting, Copilot will also be able to quickly summarize past conversations in a Microsoft Teams channel, making is easily accessible for users so they will not have to scroll through reams of past messages.

Also being introduced is a new Copilot compose box. Users can write messages in their Teams chat and channels and generative AI will tweak the tone and length of messages before they are sent.

More exciting features and functionality on its way to Microsoft Teams. Stay tuned to our blog for more updates!

Read More:

Has Your Business Considered Hardware as a Service Yet?

Understand a Two-Tier ERP System

Back to IT News