Microsoft managed to do the impossible at the recent Build 2018 summit – they got us excited about meetings!
Most people in the professional world dread meetings because they take up too much time, require you to travel, and often conclude with the most productive or insightful revelations quickly forgotten.
The new suite of Microsoft meeting technology may be able to solve most of these problems – even if they can’t get that one guy to stop derailing the topic at hand. A 360° camera and microphone array captures both audio and visual data for virtual networking. Visual recognition identifies who is present and who is currently speaking, while audio recognition transcribes every word said.
Some nifty integration features with Microsoft’s Office suite and their other productivity tools are now available – all of which can be anchored through Microsoft’s impressive Surface Hub display. Eventually, we could see transcribing tools implemented with full BI integration, turning meetings into siftable, searchable data points.
Learn how this new tech could completely transform meetings as we know them.
A New Way to Meet (With Most of the Dull Stuff Automated)
Imagine you arrive at a meeting and a disembodied voice greets you. One person is late. They might not make it. The computer voice then asks the meeting conductor if they want to get started. They say “yes” and immediately launch into business.
Which cloud is right for your team?
As the meeting head talks, every word is transcribed for them. The conversation is displayed on a window. Above that window, each participant is visible thanks to a panoramic 360° view paired with convenient labels. To the right, a second window highlights the most important conversational details – the ones that promise further action. For instance, if someone promises to follow up on something in a week, that detail is highlighted.
All of these capabilities show how Microsoft’s new meeting technology simplifies some of the most important yet mundane tasks, like taking notes. At the same time, everyone has equal access to information. If they want to, they can scroll up to make sure they heard something right concerning an earlier detail.
Most important, the system’s Natural Language Processing keeps track of action items, providing a single source of truth while dramatically reducing the risk that an important item drops off the radar. The system can preserve the promised date and automatically set a reminder for it in Microsoft Teams (their competitor to Slack). Translation tools will also ensure that the conversation can be followed easily, even across multiple languages. No need to rely on fake translators anymore!
New Meeting Technology Points at BI Integration
Taken individually, the capabilities of Microsoft’s new meeting technology could be seen as gimmicky, but taken together they point toward a future where unstructured data becomes measurable and quantifiable.
Imagine seeing a graph of how often a particular pain point is mentioned over time. Or, imagine a system showing that certain topics like “GDPR compliance” have been avoided for too long.
By adding structure and a permanent record to verbal discussions, data like this can eventually be sorted and sifted with BI tools, yielding further insights. BI integration with tools like Microsoft Office or Salesforce could mean quick imports to dashboards or spreadsheets, or the use of verbal commands to display customer data on the fly.
Features like these aren’t just convenient. They could be the secret to having meetings that are genuinely productive.
