During the COVID-19 pandemic, as many organizations allowed their employees to work from home, Microsoft Teams became an important application for teams to meet and collaborate online. Microsoft supported them by providing regular feature updates to Microsoft Teams.
Recently the company released a new update that adds two new features to the free version of the popular app. With this new update, free users can now schedule meetings and enable live captions during the meetings.
How to schedule meetings in Microsoft Teams?
Free version users of Microsoft Teams can now schedule meetings and send out invitations in advance. According to Microsoft, this new capability is built on top of the existing ability "Meet Now".
Meeting schedulers will have the option to either copy the meeting link to send directly to other participants or send an invite via the Outlook or Google calendar. And there will be no time limit on meetings in the free version of Teams.
Here's how you can schedule and start meetings in the free version of Microsoft Team:
How to turn on live captions during Microsoft Teams meetings?
The Microsoft Teams free users can now turn on live captions during calls and meetings. Though this feature was announced back in March, with this update it is now available for all users.
With this feature, Microsoft Teams will provide participants another way to follow along with the conversation and address the needs of participants with different hearing abilities or language proficiencies. This feature is currently available as a preview in U.S. English only.
Here's how the live caption will work during Microsoft Teams meeting:
The new feature update is rolling out to all the free Teams users right now. If you are already a user of the free version of Teams, this update will automatically happen while the users who are just signing up now will be able to experience it soon. As a note, the free version of Microsoft Teams also provides all types of organizations up to 500,000 users with the following benefits:
- Unlimited chat and search
- Audio and video calling
- Scheduled meetings
- 10 GB team file storage and 2 GB personal file storage per person
- Ability to use the Office web apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote)
- Unlimited app integration
- And much more...