Microsoft has decided which parts of Teams are worth paying extra for. From February a new tier, Teams Premium, will carry a set of features that until now came with the ordinary Microsoft 365 licence — and a set of new ones built on the OpenAI models Microsoft has been investing in. The price is $10 per user per month, with an introductory $7 until the end of June and a 30-day free trial that started last month.
What moves behind the wall
Microsoft’s December licensing note lists the features being transferred from the standard Teams licence to Premium:
- Live translated captions — subtitles in a language other than the one being spoken, the feature most useful to mixed-language teams.
- Custom Together Mode scenes, which place participants in a shared virtual room.
- Virtual appointments with SMS reminders, a queue view and analytics in the admin centre — the tools clinics and banks use for scheduled video consultations.
- Timeline markers showing when each participant joined and left a recording.
New in Premium: meeting watermarks and labels for sensitive content, a block on copying text from meeting chat, custom meeting branding, and “advanced meeting protection”.
The AI part
The feature Microsoft actually wants to sell is Intelligent Recap: after a recorded meeting, a GPT-3.5 model produces notes, a list of who said what on which topic, and suggested action items, with chapters you can jump to. It arrives in Premium later in the first half of the year. It is the first product in Microsoft’s line-up to carry OpenAI’s technology under a price tag, six weeks after ChatGPT made the technology famous.
Who is affected here
Teams is the default meeting tool in Bangladesh’s banks, the larger NGOs, universities on Microsoft 365 for Education, and most companies that work with European or American clients. The translated captions are the loss that will be felt: a Dhaka team joining a Berlin stand-up has been able to read German as English for free, and from February that costs $10 a head. Students and personal accounts are not affected — the free consumer Teams is unchanged — and organisations on Education licences keep most features.
The free alternatives
Google Meet still translates captions at no extra charge on Workspace business plans, and Zoom includes translated captions in its paid tiers without a further add-on. For a team that only needs the translation, that comparison is the one to put to whoever holds the Microsoft budget.
Source: The Verge, via Prothom Alo.
