Microsoft Teams Premium is getting a GPT boost via OpenAI
If you aren't already using ChatGPT to churn through information and undertake writing tasks, you could soon get a taste of it through the Teams Premium Microsoft 365 add-on subscription.
Teams Premium is now generally available and Microsoft has revealed that the AI features it's getting -- such as an intelligent recap of meetings -- are powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 series of large language models that are behind OpenAI's hit chatbot ChatGPT and are available to developers via Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service APIs.
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"Teams Premium brings the latest technologies, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected—whether it's one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars," Microsoft says in an announcement.
Microsoft is offering an introductory discount price of $7 per month for the Teams Premium subscription. The price is available for the entire term of the initial subscription (except for some month-to-month and some three-year annual billed monthly subscriptions). The offer ends on June 30, 2023, when it returns to the standard $10 per month per user, as it's been promoted since launching in preview last October.
Microsoft 365 and Office 365 licenses, such as E3 and E5, are a requisite to the Teams Premium subscription. Microsoft's recent survey of 4,500 workers found a strong demand for AI tools to automate mundane tasks, so it might be Teams users pressuring employers to purchase the subscription.
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Microsoft says Teams Premium obviates the need for third-party add-on products that some professionals buy to enhance webinars, virtual appointments, and meeting intelligence.
Intelligent recap has so far been the headline description for the AI features of Teams Premium, but Microsoft has now detailed more capabilities that public experimentation with ChatGPT online has demonstrated, from answering complex questions to writing essays, solving coding questions, and generating questions a university professor would use.
Teams Premium's AI-generated chapters divides PowerPoint Live meeting recordings into sections. For Teams itself, intelligent recap does this job based on meeting transcripts.
Personalized timeline markers help with catching up on missed meeting minutes by marking out when the user joined or left. It will also eventually mark where the user's name was mentioned, when a screen was shared, who spoke at a meeting, and when the user spoke during a meeting.
GPT-3.5 also underpins Teams Premium AI-generated notes, which creates key points and takeaways captured during a meeting. The idea is that users can focus on the meeting rather than taking notes.
As Microsoft has previously stated, intelligent recap capabilities won't be available until the second quarter of 2023.
Microsoft's $10 billion investment in OpenAI has helped revamp its messaging around workers wanting AI in products, including Microsoft 365/Office 365, Azure, and GitHub's Codex-powered pair programming tool, Copilot. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said last month that Microsoft will "incorporate AI in every layer of the stack" across productivity and consumer services.
Microsoft is reportedly testing ChatGPT to answer some Bing questions to challenge Google in search. Google is also reportedly testing in-house answers to ChatGPT for Google Search.
More AI features in Teams Premium that will be available in mid-February include live translations, branded meetings, organization backgrounds, organization together mode scenes, and meeting template for IT admins. Other features include advanced meeting protection, watermarking content to deter leaks, and limits on who can record.
Also: What is ChatGPT and why does it matter? Here's everything you need to know
Teams Virtual Appointments has been in preview since October and enables external attendees to join a branded virtual lobby room via a message.
Microsoft this month reported it had seen "strong interest" in Teams Premium. The company is looking at subscriptions like this to boost revenues as cloud revenues growth (including Azure and Office 365) slows and Windows OEM revenues decline. This shift comes as Teams user number growth slows, too.
Teams now has 280 million monthly active users, up from 270 million monthly active users it reported in January 2022. Thanks to the pandemic, Teams user numbers more than tripled between 2020 and 2021, growing from 44 million daily active users in March 2020 to 145 million daily active users in April 2021.
Microsoft Teams Premium is getting a GPT boost.