Microsoft has spent the last two years introducing dazzling new productivity capabilities to Teams, and now, owing to artificial intelligence, the company is revamping how the foundations function. We’ve all been on a call where someone’s room acoustics made it difficult to hear them, or when two people tried to chat at the same time, resulting in an embarrassing “no, you go ahead” moment. Microsoft’s new AI-powered voice quality enhancements should reduce or eliminate these minor annoyances.
Microsoft is now utilizing machine learning models to improve room acoustics, so you won’t sound like you’re in a cave. “While we’ve been doing our best with digital signal processing to do a really good job in Teams, we’ve now started using machine learning for the first time to build echo cancellation where you can truly reduce echo from all the different devices,” says Robert Aichner, Microsoft’s principal program manager for intelligent conversation and communications cloud, in an interview with The Verge.
