Microsoft has spent the past two years adding flashy new productivity features to Microsoft Teams, and now the company is overhauling how the fundamentals work thanks to AI.
Microsoft has been testing this for months, measuring its models in the real world to ensure that Teams users notice the echo reduction and improvements in call quality.
We've all been on a call where someone has poor room acoustics making it hard to hear them, or seen two people try to talk simultaneously, creating an awkward "no, you go ahead" moment.
Microsoft's new AI-powered voice quality improvements should improve or even eliminate these day-to-day annoyances.
Microsoft is now using machine learning models to improve room acoustics so you'll no longer sound like you're hiding in a cave. "While we have been trying our best with digital signal processing to do an excellent job in Teams, we have now started using machine learning for the first time to build echo cancellation.
As a result, you can truly reduce echo from all the different devices," explains Robert Aichner, a principal program manager for intelligent conversation and communications cloud at Microsoft.
In addition, the software maker used 30,000 hours of speech to help train its models and captured thousands of devices through crowdsourcing, where Teams users are paid to record their voice and playback audio from their device.
"We also simulate about 100,000 different rooms... the room acoustics play a big role in echo cancellation," says Aichner. The result is significant improvements in call audio quality and an echo elimination that allows multiple people to speak simultaneously. You can see all of the advancements in action in the video above.
Suppose Teams detect sound is bouncing or reverberating in a room resulting in shallow audio. In that case, the model will also convert captured audio to make it sound like team participants are speaking into a close-range microphone instead of an echoey mess.
The most impressive part is the ability for people to interrupt each other on Teams calls now, without the awkward overlap where you can't hear the other person due to the echo. Microsoft is shipping all this work in Teams; alongside the improvements it has made with AI-based noise suppression. The processing is done locally on client devices instead of in the cloud.
"We said we want to do it on the client because the cloud is still expensive if you want to do every call processed in the cloud... and we'd have to pass that cost onto the customer," explains Aichner. However, that would mean restricting these necessary Teams improvements to paying customers. The on-device route means features like noise suppression are available on 90 percent of devices using Teams.
These new Microsoft Teams improvements are now live, alongside real-time screen optimizations for text in videos and AI-based edits to bandwidth constraints during video or screen-sharing calls.
Microsoft disclosed Teams at an event in New York and pitched the service globally on March 14, 2017. It was formed during an internal hackathon at the company headquarters and is presently led by Microsoft corporate vice president Brian MacDonald.Microsoft Teams is a web-based desktop app designed on top of the Electron framework from GitHub, which connects the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js JavaScript forum.
On August 29, 2007, Microsoft bought Parlano and its ongoing group chat product, MindAlign. On March 4, 2016, Microsoft considered bidding $8 billion for Slack, but Bill Gates was against the purchase, stating that the firm should focus on improving Skype for Business instead. Qi Lu, EVP of Applications and Services, was conducting the push to purchase Slack. After the exit of Lu later that year, Microsoft announced Teams to the public as an immediate competitor to Slack on November 2, 2016.
Slack conducted a full-page advertisement in the New York Times recognizing the competing service. Though Slack is used by 28 Fortune 100, executives will question paying for the service if Teams delivers an identical function in their company's existing Office 365 subscription at no added cost.
The companies were not contending for the same audience, as Teams, at the time, did not allow members outside the subscription to join the platform, and small businesses and freelancers would have been improbable to switch. Microsoft has since added this functionality. In reaction to Teams' announcement, Slack deepened in-product integration with Google services.
On May 3, 2017, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams would replace Microsoft Classroom in Office 365 Education (previously known as Office 365 for Education). On July 12, 2018, Microsoft announced a free rendition of Microsoft Teams, delivering most of the platform's communication options for no charge but determining the number of users and team file storage capacity.
In January 2019, Microsoft discharged an update targeting "Firstline Workers" to improve the interoperability of Microsoft Teams between additional computers for retail workers.
In September 2019, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business would be phased out in favor of Teams. Consequently, hosted Skype for Business Online was discontinued for new Office 365 customers that same month and was stopped entirely on July 31, 2021.
On November 19, 2019, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams reached 20 million active users. It was an increase from 13 million in July of that year. In addition, it announced a "Walkie Talkie" feature in early 2020 that employs push-to-talk on smartphones and tablets over Wi-Fi or cellular data. The part was created for employees who speak with customers or run day-to-day operations.
On March 19, 2020, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Teams had struck 44 million daily users due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft reported that by April 2020, Microsoft Teams had hit 75 million daily users. On a single day in April, it logged 4.1 billion session minutes.
On June 22, 2020, Microsoft revealed that its acquired video game live streaming service Mixer would close down in July of that year, and its staff would be assigned to the Microsoft Teams division.
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