The Microsoft competitor of Slack, Microsoft Teams, will become a year old this week and in an attempt to celebrate, the competitor is unveiling a few new features today. The most interesting of them so far are Cortana integration and inline message translation. Cortana integration will be coming to Microsoft Teams before long with support for voice interactions through Team-enabled devices like IP phones and conference room devices.
Message translation will give the participants of Microsoft Teams the ability to automatically translate messages in channels and chat messages. This particularly is a beneficial add-on if one works with remote teams that communicate in different languages. Along with Cortana and translation, Microsoft is also including cloud recording for meetings with automatic transcription and timecoding, background blur on video, mobile sharing for meetings, and the ability to find and add Skype Room Systems into any meetings.
According to the reports reaching us from our sources, some new Microsoft Teams stats were scheduled to be revealed by Microsoft yesterday. About 200,000 businesses in 181 countries are now making use of Microsoft Teams and this includes new customers like NASCAR, General Motors, and Technicolor. When it was launched, Microsoft Teams had about 50,000 businesses using the service, and with what we’ve seen so far, it looks as if there is a substantial growth. It also looks like it is aiming at challenging Slack’s 6 million daily users. Microsoft is expected to introduce a free version of Microsoft Teams soon, in addition, the company is also working hard to integrate its service into the conferencing displays of the Surface Hub.
In addition, Microsoft let out some call-related features which are approximately going to hit Teams in the second quarter of 2018. Among which are consultative transfer, and also call delegation and federation. Direct routing is also soon to come, which will give organizations liberty to use existing telephony infrastructure with calling in Teams. These calling features come up as Microsoft continues to move Skype for Business over to Teams.
