It’s there – AI notes for your Teams meeting! Microsoft released it a few weeks ago as a Preview feature and it’s available (but not globally). Intelligent meeting recap automatically generates a summary of your meeting with suggested notes. Is it good or is it bad? What’s still missing? Let’s go and test this brand-new feature in Teams!
AI in Teams (Premium)
The recap is designed to automatically generate a summary of your meetings. You don’t need to do any additional tasks – just finish the meeting and wait for the recap 😊
Well, that’s not that simple – there are some limitations and requirements that you should know and understand.
- AI Recap is available only in Teams Premium, so you need to acquire a license to use it. If you don’t have such a license but you want to test it, you can use the Trial version and play for 30 days. You get 25 licenses in the trial. How to get the trial – check this post.
- You need to enable a meeting transcript
- You must choose English as a spoken language in the transcript (other languages will be available later this year)
- You need to record the meeting
- The feature is not available in the EU-based tenants – it should be available in August 2023
How to use AI Recap
1. The first step is to schedule and start a meeting. You don’t need any additional configuration here.
Now the important steps – you must enable the transcript.
2. Choose English as a spoken language (this is very important – only English is supported currently).
3. Start recording and then you can start the meeting itself
4. When the meeting is over you can stop the recording. No additional tasks or steps are required.
5. Open the meeting details window in Teams and navigate to the Recap section.
6. The recap is available in the AI notes section. It is automatically generated but the process takes some time (I usually get it within 10 minutes).
- When notes are ready you can find 2 sections:
- Suggested notes – summary of the meeting grouped by an attendee
- Suggested tasks – tasks gathered from the meeting context
7. Now you can read those notes and copy text to use in a document or email.
Additional tests
I made some additional tests to check limits, quality, and stability.
1. Notes quality
The most important part – is it good or bad? I tested notes on short and long meetings (from 2 to almost 50 minutes). The notes were good and gave me enough information to understand meetings. I noticed some glitches – when I used non-English words (for example, my name – Marcin) the AI made typos from time to time. AI uses transcripts to generate notes so the better the transcript, the better the notes.
AI notes shine when you have long meetings with multiple people. Notes are detailed and you can quickly get a summary of the meeting without watching recordings.
On the other hand, I had problems with Suggested tasks. I prepared a script for a meeting with multiple tasks. Transcript got all of them without any typos, but I couldn’t get good results in notes. The best result – 2 tasks from a long meeting.
I do not know what I should say to get a task in the summary. More tests are needed.
2. Short meetings
Notes for short meetings are short but good enough to get an insight into the meeting.
3. Long meetings
Notes are divided into sections and grouped by attendees. They are detailed and you can easily understand the purpose of the meeting. The screen below shows a 40-minute-long meeting with 1 guest attendee.
One thing I need to check later – notes are grouped by first name. What if there are 2 attendees with the same first name?
4. I tested AI notes using English because other languages are not supported at this time. I tried Polish but I got the error – We’re unable to create notes from the transcript.
5. Notes are generated within minutes. I got results in 5-15 minutes (depending on the meeting time). In one case I had to wait for 2 hours… Microsoft is in the rollout phase so it could be the case. Will test it again later.
Summary
Microsoft announced many AI features but most of them are still in development phase. AI recap is the first feature that’s really here (now it’s officially available). It requires the Teams Premium license so it’s not available for all Teams users by default.
What is the most important – notes quality. I tested the feature for some time and the quality was good enough to provide me with detailed info about meetings. I was able to create notes with tasks and plan additional actions. I used ChatGPT to get comparable results using transcript files – after a few iterations outcomes were similar with the same level of quality 😊
Suggested tasks didn’t work for me – 5 tasks from 15 meetings… I will make additional tests later to check what’s going on here.
Business meetings, project summaries, Q&A sessions, Board meetings, Sales training, brainstorming sessions, training, workshops… you can quickly summarize a meeting and plan the next actions. It’ll speed up the note-taking process and get you more information from your meetings. It’s also a great feature if you missed a meeting – you can quickly read a summary and jump to the specific part of the recording.
But, beware – AI recap uses a language model. Notes won’t be perfect all the time. The AI model can skip something or even ‘hallucinate’. You should use it as a tool and read notes before sending them or pasting them to a document.
One more thing – security. Microsoft statement – “The data is not exposed to 3rd parties, and even in the case of the GPT-based models, Microsoft runs the models internally. This is true for all intelligent recap features.” It means that the GPT model won’t use your meetings data to learn, and your data will be used only internally to generate a recap.
