The next wave of Copilot in Microsoft Teams

From the time Microsoft Teams was launched in 2017, we’ve always had a unique point of view – that communication and collaboration should be seamlessly integrated into a unified experience. From scheduled meetings, to calls, chats, document collaboration, app integration, and more – Teams gives everyone one place to work together. And now, with AI deeply embedded, Teams is the smart place to work, enabling everyone to be more productive and find new ways to amplify their potential. So when we announced Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams meetings, we knew that it was the first of many milestones to add intelligence to all the ways people use Teams to communicate and collaborate.

Today, at the Microsoft Inspire conference, we announced the next wave of generative AI for Teams, with the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams Phone and Teams chat. Incorporating advanced AI capabilities into unscheduled phone calls and written chat conversations, Copilot will now help you stay on top of your discussions, capture important information, and follow up on action items.

Copilot in Teams Phone

The introduction of Copilot makes Teams Phone the first leading UCaaS solution to add generative AI capabilities to phone calls. With this new capability, you can make and receive calls from your Teams app on any device and get real-time summarization and insights. You can also ask Copilot to draft notes for you during the call and highlight key points, such as names, dates, numbers, and tasks using natural language commands.

To understand the power of Copilot on your phone calls, imagine that you are a marketer who needs to explain a new product to a potential customer. You use Teams Phone to call the customer and start a conversation. As the customer talks, Copilot summarizes the call and captures their relevant questions about the product features, benefits, and pricing. This allows you to stay focused on landing the pitch and saves you time by summarizing the conversation. Copilot can also capture the customer’s feedback and suggest next steps. You can use this information when writing a follow-up email with supporting content and information to address the questions raised during the call. Using Copilot on your phone calls can help improve your communication skills and save time on administrative tasks.

Copilot in Teams Phone supports both VoIP and PSTN calls, so you can enjoy the benefits of real-time summarization and insights, regardless of the type of call. Copilot in Teams Phone is now available to customers participating in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program.

Copilot in Teams chat

With Copilot in Teams chat, you can quickly synthesize key information from your chat threads – allowing you to ask specific questions (or use one of the suggested prompts) to help get caught up on the conversation so far, organize key discussion points, and summarize information relevant to you. Copilot reduces the effort of managing different chats and helps you spend more time on the things that matter, without interrupting the flow of your work.

Imagine that your team is using Teams chat to converse and outline a new social media marketing campaign. The team works across different time zones, and when you start the day, you need to quickly catch up on the progress that happened overnight. With Copilot in Teams chat, you can ask questions to generate a summary of the chat conversation over a recent time period you specify (Copilot provides prompts for the past day, seven days, or 30 days), without having to scroll through long chat threads or ask for repeated updates. Copilot will analyze the chat messages and highlight the main points and action items such as deadlines, milestones, and deliverables for each participant. You can ask Copilot to extract key information, for example to create a table with roles and responsibilities or a list of dependencies and issues. In addition, Copilot can flag information specific to you, like creating a list with your open action items. This helps you stay informed without interrupting the team, saving valuable time by focusing on the work ahead.

Copilot in Teams chat is now available to customers participating in the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program.

Learn more

To watch the Microsoft Inspire sessions where we cover this news in more detail, be sure to register and tune in to the following on-demand content: Accelerating business growth with Microsoft Teams and Enable AI-powered flexible workplaces with Teams (Phone, Rooms, & Premium).

If you’re interested in going even deeper, check out this episode of Inside Microsoft Teams, where we explore how Copilot in Teams Meetings, Phone, and chat work in more detail with the lead product managers responsible for building each experience.

What’s next?

As the AI landscape evolves further, we will continue to innovate and bring new features and capabilities to Copilot for Microsoft Teams. Our goal is to make communication and collaboration smarter and easier, while saving time and information overload, all with the help of AI.

For a view of all the additional Microsoft Teams announcements we made at Inspire, check out the What’s New in Teams | Microsoft Inspire 2023 edition.

Thank you for being part of the Microsoft Teams community!