Microsoft's Slack competitor is getting Cortana integration and message translation

Microsoft Surface Hub 2 incoming

Microsoft Surface Hub 2 incoming

There will also be inline message translation, so you can easily understand other participants that speak other languages.

Slack said in September that it had 6M DAUs and over 50K paying teams.

Microsoft Teams is the company's answer to growing chat startup Slack.

Slack has over 1K third-party apps, compared to 250 for Teams.

But now over 200,000 businesses are currently using Teams, including the likes of General Motors, A.P. Moller-Maersk, and Nascar. A future upgrade will include facial recognition so that comments can be assigned to specific individuals. For instance, "Microsoft Teams will be natively supported on a Surface Hub (above), enhancing the capabilities of Teams in huddle spaces and meeting rooms", the software giant said.

Message translation will allow Microsoft Teams participants to automatically translate messages in channels and chat messages. Team Meetings will also support audio and HD video conference room systems from Lenovo, HP, Logitech and others, along with any Skype Room systems.

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Video call participants will be able to blur the background on their calls, so the person you're talking to won't be able to see what's behind you.

First off is cloud recording, which will provide "one-click meeting recordings with automatic transcription and timecoding, enabling all team members the ability to read captions, search within the conversation, and playback all or part of the meeting".

The last two additions will be proximity detection for Teams Meetings, to make it easier for people to discover and add a nearby and available Skype Room System to any meeting. It'll also let you share a live video stream, photos or screens from your smartphone.

Finally, a number of enterprise-grade features are planned, including consultative transfer, call delegation, and federation.

She did, however, call out one additional statistic, that being that Microsoft has more than 125 million users on Office 365 today - and since Teams is built on the backbone of Office 365, "the data we get through the Microsoft Graph lets us do things we want to do around AI, cognitive services, and machine learning to power the future of intelligent communications". You can hear more about these features during Enterprise Connect this week on Wednesday, March 14.

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