Microsoft has developed many useful features for Teams on the web that bring the browser experience a little closer to the Teams desktop app.
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Teams for web includes custom background effects, Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) subtitles, and Live Captions and Live Transcript, Microsoft announced in a post.
These updates follow Microsoft's addition of Firefox to the list of supported browsers in Teams last month, in addition to Chrome and Edge.
Microsoft added custom backgrounds to the Teams desktop app for Mac and Windows in June 2020: before that Teams only had blurred backgrounds to help users have a little more privacy when holding online meetings from home.
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As Microsoft points out, “blurring or replacing a background may not prevent sensitive information from being visible to other people in the meeting.”
Microsoft says these changes to Teams online are aimed at small businesses facing “unprecedented challenges.”
The top concern for U.S. small businesses today by a wide margin is inflation, followed by supply chain issues and revenue, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Q2 2022 Small Business Index. Concerns about the impact of COVID-19 pale in comparison to those about economic headwinds, the report says.
CART captions in Teams for web could be useful for businesses that want to use Teams in the browser. This avoids the need to view captions from a secondary window.
Meeting organizers and participants can enable CART captions from their meeting options, which are detailed here.
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Microsoft enabled live transcription and captioning in Teams for desktop for 27 languages in September 2021, so now this same breadth in language support for the two services is available for Teams for web.
Information source: zdnet.com
