With the rapid evolution of communication technologies, Microsoft Teams continues to stand out by offering innovative solutions to improve meeting productivity. One of the latest advances is the integration of voice recognition and Copilot in Windows-based Teams rooms. Previously, this feature was only available with intelligent speaker equipment in the room. Now, any Windows-based Teams room can enhance meeting experiences with precise speaker assignment and intelligent information from Copilot. In this article, you’ll find out how you can benefit from this new technology and, above all, how to implement it in your company.
Speech recognition: a revolution for meetings
Speech recognition in Microsoft Teams rooms identifies each speaker by their unique vocal characteristics, such as tone, pitch and speaking style. This technology, similar to a voiceprint, ensures precise, clear capture of each participant, even in noisy environments.
Advantages of voice recognition
- Precise transcriptions: each word is attributed to its speaker in the transcript, making it easy to keep track of discussions and decisions.
- Background noise reduction: Background noise suppression ensures clearer calls and meetings.
- Intelligent recap: Thanks to Copilot, meeting summaries are more precise, with clear attributions of everyone’s contributions.
Copilot: your intelligent assistant
Copilot uses meeting transcripts to provide summaries, insights and action items. By identifying each speaker, Copilot can generate personalized summaries and recommendations based on each participant’s contributions.
Without speaker recognition (photo above), the audio will be assigned to the room unless individuals have recorded their voice. In this case, you can see that all the speakers in the room are grouped under “Conf room 1245”.
With speaker recognition (pictured above), the Teams Room can identify speakers during live transcription in shared meeting rooms, guaranteeing clear and accurate voice capture of each participant. This allows you to effortlessly track who said what during the meeting thanks to the meeting transcript and to activate an intelligent meeting summary and Copilot.
How to activate these functions
To take advantage of voice recognition and Copilot, simply create a voice profile in the Teams application. Once configured, each participant will be identified in transcripts and meeting notes, enabling more efficient meeting management. To be able to create your voice profile, your IT department will need to create or modify a meeting policy to allow your meeting rooms to assign names to people, as well as another meeting policy to allow the user to record their voiceprint.
Follow the steps below:
- Connect to Teams using the PowerShell module
- Enable speaker recognition in your Teams meeting rooms and assign this strategy to your rooms.
- Assign a meeting strategy allowing voiceprint recording to your users
Connect-MicrosoftTeams
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity <RoomPolicyName> -RoomAttributeUserOverride Attribute -AllowTranscription $true
Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity <UserPolicyName> -EnrollUserOverride Enabled -AllowTranscription $true
Once the strategies have been created and assigned to your rooms and users, you can use the recognition section of your Microsoft Teams client to record your voice profile (see image below).
Security
Microsoft takes customer data very seriously, and is committed to data security, including biometric profiles. Users’ voice and facial data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and is protected by Microsoft’s security and privacy policies and practices. Users’ voice and facial data is stored in the same region as their Microsoft Teams data, and the storage is GDPR-compliant. Users can unsubscribe their voice or face profile at any time. Profiles are automatically deleted when a Teams account is deleted or if it is not used for a year.
Conclusion
The integration of voice recognition and Copilot in Microsoft Teams rooms represents a major step forward for hybrid meetings. By accurately identifying speakers and providing intelligent summaries, these technologies maximize meeting productivity and efficiency. Adopt these innovations to transform your meetings and make the most of every interaction with your colleagues.
