Traditionally, missing a meeting—or even just a part of it—could mean being left behind while the rest of the team pressed forward. Referring to prior meetings was tedious, requiring employees to sift through hours of recorded dialogue to find specific reference points.
Microsoft Teams aims to change that with its AI-powered Intelligent Recap feature in Microsoft Teams Premium.
Intelligent Recap uses machine learning to make meetings more useful for people who attend and for those who need to catch up on what happened later.
Intelligent Recap can summarize meetings and identify key discussion points and action items. It also has special organizational properties, allowing employees to view meeting recordings in color-coded segments that can be sorted by speaker or topic.
“Microsoft Teams Intelligent Recap is a game-changer, especially for busy organizational leaders,” says Claire Sisson, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital, the internal IT organization at Microsoft. “Whether you need to follow up on tasks, share notes, or catch up on a meeting you missed, Intelligent Recap has you covered.”
- Learn how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
- Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.
How Intelligent Recap works
Microsoft Teams has a meeting recap feature that includes generating meeting transcripts. The technology behind Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium uses AI to take this type of capability further.
After a meeting is recorded, Intelligent Recap identifies spoken names and the general topics being covered in a meeting. The technology can suggest “chapters” that organize and summarize meetings. It can even suggest action items based on what was discussed.
That information, along with information about events that happened within the meeting, such as when participants shared their screen, is made available to all meeting participants within a few minutes of the meeting’s conclusion.
Let’s take a look at how we use Intelligent Recap internally here at Microsoft (and how you can use it at your company).
Intelligent Recap results
Efficiency for everyone
Intelligent Recap gives us visual indicators that help meeting participants—and non-participants—quickly refer to key moments in a discussion.
Some indicators are shown to all meeting participants, while others are only seen in a participant’s personal view.
Personalized timeline markers include indicators that bookmark moments such as when one of our employees joined or left a meeting and when their name is mentioned.
These personalized indicators make it easy to catch up on anything from the meeting someone might have missed. Perhaps more important, everyone else can be confident that that person will catch up in real time.
Intelligent Meeting Recap helps to eliminate those few minutes at the start of a meeting debating how long to wait for a delayed colleague.
“There’s no need to wait around anymore before we start a meeting,” says Chanda Jensen, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, who manages the roll out of new Teams meetings features internally at Microsoft. “Since we have Intelligent Recap, those who’ve joined late or need to leave early in a meeting can easily watch anything that they’ve missed before or after using the personalized join and leave markers.”
Another marker shows meeting participants anytime someone mentions their name. The marker will also pop up a very brief snippet of transcript surrounding the mention, so viewers can easily see the context of the mention.
Using at-mention markers
All participants can see an interactive, visual representation of the participants who spoke during the meeting, called the speaker bar.
The speaker bar reduces time spent scrolling back and forth through a transcript or recording to find a remark you want to reference.
“Let’s say I’m very interested in something one particular colleague had to say,” Jensen says. “I can easily click on their speaker bar, and the recording will jump exactly to that point.”
AI takes notes for you
A major leap for machine learning within Microsoft Teams Premium is Intelligent Recap’s auto-generated topics, chapters, notes, and action items.
Intelligent Recap can identify sections of recorded meetings and summarize them. In a few minutes after a meeting concludes, a bar of AI-generated topics synchronized to the recording appears below the meeting video.
“This feature automatically captures the topics that were brought up during the meeting, and divides them into color-coded segments,” Jensen says. “So, if you were only interested in a specific topic that was discussed, you can easily skip to that, and the recording will go to that section.”
As part of this feature, an “AI Notes” tab is populated with “Meeting Notes” and “Follow-up Tasks.”
This is meant to make note taking and meeting follow-up more efficient, especially for busy participants and teams that work asynchronously.
“It gives you a basis for your notes and tasks, rather than having to create everything from scratch,” Jensen says. “It’s almost like sending your personal note-taker right to these meetings.”
Employee benefits
The response to Intelligent Recap has been enthusiastic here at Microsoft.
“This is one of the most impactful features I have seen introduced with hybrid work,” says Tyler Russell, a senior engineering architect on the Azure Databases SQL Customer Success Engineering team. “This functionality improves my productivity significantly and I have started recording more meetings because of it.”
For those involved in long meetings or who have significant meeting conflicts, Intelligent Recap is proving especially useful.
“I was recently involved in a half day, extensive leadership meeting,” says Mike Friday, senior director on the Global Customer Experience—Strategic Programs Team. “Having the Intelligent Recap feature enabled me to quickly catch up with my team through AI-generated notes.”
Boosting asynchronous communication
The features and benefits of Intelligent Recap represent progress in making asynchronous work more efficient.
Traditionally, meetings must take place at a specific time. This creates tension with asynchronous work conditions, where employees live in different time zones and with various living circumstances.
An urgent meeting might be delayed because of the need to include someone in a different time zone, or canceled because one participant has a sick child.
Intelligent Recap’s AI-driven features enable teams to maintain their velocity without losing collaborative value from a team member.
“A lot of my colleagues overseas constantly have to catch up on the Redmond time zone work content,” Jensen says. “Now that AI is capturing the dialogue in these meetings, it’s so much easier for them. They can quickly read the AI-generated summary to see if there’s anything that needs their attention, and if they are mentioned, they can rapidly review that specific part of the recording.”
Intelligent Recap makes it possible for asynchronous teams to welcome more diversity in terms of geographic location and other factors that can impact same-time availability.
Our team looks forward to furthering the feature’s capabilities and offering support in multiple languages beyond English.
“Microsoft’s AI and machine learning capabilities helped bring Intelligent Recap to life,” Sisson says. “Intelligent Recap represents the dawn of a new era for Teams. We expect to continue to roll out AI-based features to make asynchronous work easier, more collaborative, and more effective.”
Here are our top learnings from using Intelligent Recap:
- It will enhance meetings for those on the call and those who couldn’t make it at the time of the meeting.
- It will summarize your meetings, take notes for you, and identify key discussion points and action items for attendees.
- It offers personalized timeline markers and presents information by topic or speaker in color-coded segments, streamlining meeting catch-up.
- It paves the way for diverse teams with varying needs and global locations to collaborate more effectively.
