Now in public preview: Automatic lowering of a user's Raised Hand after speaking

[Jan_Steberl]

Description

To reduce the number of stale raised hands in meetings, we now suggest users to lower their raised hand after we detect they spoke in the meeting. If users don't take any action on the suggestion notification, we'll automatically lower their hand. This should ensure smoother meeting facilitation for organizers and presenters.

 

Flighting status

Available to everyone in Public Preview channel.

 

How to enable

Users who raise their hand in a Teams meeting and speak in the meeting will see a notification informing them that their hand will automatically be lowered soon. They will be able to choose to keep their hand raised. If the user doesn't take action on the notification, their hand will automatically lower. This should ensure smoother meeting facilitation for organizers and presenters.

Note 1: If you need information about enabling the public preview itself, see “Enable the public preview for Teams” below.

Note 2: To be able to use this feature, user needs to be in Public Preview. Other meeting participants are not required to be in Public Preview.

 

Supported clients and platforms

Windows	macOS	iOS	Android	Linux	Google Chrome	Firefox	Safari	Microsoft Edge
Yes	Yes

Known issues

None

 

Known limitations

Users will not see the notification and their hand will not be automatically lowered if Noise suppression is turned off in their Teams devices settings.
Please note that Noise suppression is automatically turned off when your device has high CPU usage in order to preserve resources.

Enable your Teams client for the public preview 

1. First, IT admins need to set an update policy that turns on Show preview features. Learn how at Public preview in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs.  
2. Users then choose to join the public preview individually. Learn how at Get early access to new Teams features - Office Support (microsoft.com) 

 

Send us your feedback 

Got feedback on features in the public preview or other areas of Teams? Let us know straight from Teams via Help > Give feedback.  This is on the bottom left of your client.

Thank you,

Preview Team

Quality & Customer Obsession, Microsoft Teams

[#2]

Woo-hoo!

[#3]

We don't have this in preview yet, looking forward to seeing it hopefully soon!

[#4]

Hi @sixcathy6, I am the Product Manager working on this feature. Could you please confirm that multiple users in your organization who have access to the Public Preview of Teams don't see the notification in any Teams meetings on desktop?

There is a Known limitation or Pre-requisite for the feature as mentioned in the article. The Noise suppression option in Teams devices settings should be set to any value other than Off.

Could you please double check again following the steps below and report back to us so I can investigate with the team? Thank you in advance.

Steps:
1. Next to your avatar in Teams window header, select ... menu
2. Select Settings
3. Select Devices on the list of options on the left
4. Check that Noise suppression is set to Auto (Default) OR High OR Low
5. Go to Calendar in the Teams app
6. Start a Meet now
7. Select Start meeting
8. Unmute and then select Join now
9. Raise your hand
10. Speak for 3-4 seconds
11. Wait for few seconds.

The notification should appear letting you know that your hand will be lowered soon.

[#5]

@anachetrari Hi there, it is not working in the public preview for me in our tenant

[#6]

@MatthiasRodler, thank you for letting us know.

As I asked Kathy above, could you please double check again following the steps below and report back to us so I can investigate with the team? Thank you in advance.

Steps:
1. Next to your avatar in Teams window header, select ... menu
2. Select Settings
3. Select Devices on the list of options on the left
4. Check that Noise suppression is set to Auto (Default) OR High OR Low
5. Go to Calendar in the Teams app
6. Start a Meet now
7. Select Start meeting
8. Unmute and then select Join now
9. Raise your hand
10. Speak for 3-4 seconds
11. Wait for few seconds.

The notification should appear letting you know that your hand will be lowered soon.

[#7]

Double checked before and even recorded it. Please contact me in Teams.

[#8]

We've tested with multiple people and sadly still not seeing this, happy to connect to test further

[#9]

Finally it has reached out to our tenant. Looks nice

[#10]

Glad to hear that and thank you so much for reporting back.

[#11]

How can the new feature be turned off?
It's super annoying having to react on the notification. In daily scrum meetings raising one's hand is used for signalling that someone has spoken. Sometimes teams also do spontaneous voting by raising hands. Can individual participants or the meeting host switch off the feature of automatic lowering hands easily?

[#12]

I am also wondering how we can turn this new feature off.

Currently we raise hands to indicate that someone has not yet spoken for a parking lot during scrum, and the order they speak is determined by the order they raised their hand. Often, there are several people with hands raised, and sometimes people would respond to what an earlier person has said, but still have their own parking lot issue they want to discuss. The automatic lowering then removes that person and resets the shown position in the queue for speaking if they re-raise their hand.

Currently, the only workaround I have is to set "Noise suppression" to "Off", but then we no longer have the noise suppression functionality. Please add a way to disable this feature altogether.

It would be really nice if, rather than totally disabling it, there were a way to just set it so that the prompt is to lower your hand, rather than prevent the automatic lowering. This way, it still reminds people to lower their hands once they've spoken, but doesn't automatically do so if they miss the prompt.

Another solution (to my issue at least) would be to allow setting it so that only the person who is number 1 in the queue has their hand automatically lowered, though this may still cause issues if they start a more involved conversation.

[#13]

@Jan_Steberl Is there any way to disable this new feature completely without changing the rest of the noise settings? This new feature is really problematic, because we often have to intervene on what someone says without actually speaking up to make the point we wanted to make. With this feature we lose the order of the raised hands.

[#14]

@Jan_Steberl Please make this a toggle-able feature. Not everyone wants this.

We use raised hands for our standup and this new imposed use case is beyond frustrating to constantly confirm that we wish to keep our hand up.

[#15]

@Zshandi It's like you have been in our meetings.  We would even be happy for an option to turn it off at the meeting level as I can see for meetings that are classes or presentations of that sort it would be useful but for scrum/collaborative things it's disruptive.  It's interesting to see others that have evolved to using it exactly the way we do.

[#16]

How do I turn this off?

My team uses the 'raised hands' to track who has already given their daily update in meetings, so after speaking each member raises their hand. We want them to stay up!

@Jan_Steberl 

[#17]

@Jan_Steberl 

1. Users don't see the notification to keep their hand raised, so they loose their turn if they don' pay attention
2. Is it possible to disable this feature?

[#18]

Hi @Steve1969, @Zshandi, @nv_jbonnier, @Goobaroo, @sharpjoe, @bmcbrearty, @rodolphepaccard, on behalf of the product team, I'd like to apologize that we broke some of your current scenarios by introducing this feature. Currently, there is no switch to disable this capability altogether. We will definitely consider it for V2 of this feature.

As other commenters have already identified, an workaround to disable this feature is to turn off Noise Suppression in Teams Settings as this feature doesn't work when Noise Suppression is off.

Meanwhile, to keep your hand raised and maintain your spot in the raise hand queue, please select "Keep it raised" button on the notification.

[#19]

@anachetrari as said in my post, I have never seen the "Keep it raised" button notification.

[#20]

That works well for us in the sense that it pops up but is subtle and goes away. Next meeting put your hand up and start talking and look in the middle of the teams window at the top. The notification toast drops down from the center top of the window with the team member avatars/cams hangs out and then if you don't click puts your hand down. But if you were looking at a share or answering a question and not really looking at the window it's super subtle which I am sure it attempting to not be distracting.