How Copilot and Intelligent Recap are Aggregating Value for Microsoft Teams’ Users

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A comparison of two AI-powered features that help you get the most out of your meetings 

Meetings are an essential part of our work, where we share ideas, make decisions, and collaborate with others. However, meetings can also be challenging, especially when we have to deal with multiple agendas, diverse perspectives, and complex topics. How can we make our meetings more productive, engaging, and accessible? How can we capture the key insights and outcomes of our meetings, and act on them effectively? How can we leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance our meeting experience and productivity? 

In this blog post, we will introduce you to two new AI-powered features in Microsoft Teams that aim to answer these questions: Intelligent Recap and Microsoft M365 Copilot. These are two innovative tools that help you get the most out of your meetings, by providing you with relevant and personalized information and insights based on your needs and preferences. We will explain what these features are, how they work, and how they differ from each other. We will also show you how to use them together to improve your meeting experience and productivity.

What are Intelligent Recap and Copilot? 

Intelligent Recap and Microsoft M365 Copilot are two different AI-powered features in Microsoft Teams that help you get the most out of your meetings. They both use artificial intelligence to analyze the meeting content and context and provide you with relevant and personalized information. However, they have different purposes and functionalities, as we will explain below. 

How does Intelligent Recap work? 

Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium uses AI (artificial intelligence) to deliver a personalized and intelligent overview of each meeting, helping you discover the information that matters to you most, whether you attended the meeting or missed it. It is available in Teams, on a new tab called 'Recap', where you can watch a meeting recording directly within this Teams recap page, and many of its components will also be available when you watch a meeting recording in Stream. 

Intelligent Recap automatically generates a summary of the key points and action items discussed in the meeting, using natural language processing and understanding. You can edit, add, or delete any notes as you wish, and share them with your colleagues or other stakeholders. You can also search for specific keywords or phrases in the notes, and jump to the corresponding part of the recording where they were mentioned. 

Intelligent Recap also identifies potential tasks or follow-ups that emerged from the meeting, and suggests them to you as recommendations. You can review these recommendations, assign them to yourself or others, set deadlines, and track their progress. You can also create new tasks from scratch, or link existing ones from other apps like Planner or To Do. 

Intelligent Recap creates a customized set of highlights for each meeting participant, based on their role, interests, and interactions in the meeting. For example, you might see highlights such as when your name was mentioned, when someone asked you a question, when you shared your screen, when you gave feedback, or when someone praised your work. These highlights help you catch up on what you might have missed, or revisit what you contributed to the meeting. You can also see other people's highlights by clicking on their profile pictures in the recap page. 

Some of the components of Intelligent Recap are: 

• A summary of the meeting highlights, such as key topics, decisions, actions, and follow-ups. 
• A transcript of the meeting conversation, with speaker attribution and time stamps. 
• A list of the meeting participants, with their roles and attendance status. 
• A collection of the meeting attachments, such as files, links, polls, and whiteboards. 
• A word cloud of the most frequently used words in the meeting. 
• A timeline of the meeting events, such as when someone joined, left, or shared their screen. 

Intelligent Recap helps you stay on top of your meetings, review the important information, and take action on the next steps. 

Learn more about Microsoft Teams Premium: Microsoft Teams Premium | Microsoft Teams 

How does Copilot work? 

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a dynamic and interactive feature that leverages advanced language query to deliver real-time responses to your requests. It builds on the Intelligent Recap insights by applying conversational AI (powered by GPT), and returning insights tailored to your unique prompts. While Intelligent Recap proactively offers these insights, Copilot responds to your questions and prompts, ready to help you dig deeper into the meeting context. 

Copilot uses a natural language interface that allows you to ask questions or make requests using your own words. It understands the meeting context and the intent of your queries and provides relevant and accurate answers. For example, you can ask Copilot questions like "What did John say about the budget?" or "What are the next steps for the project?" and Copilot will search for the information in the meeting transcript, notes, tasks, and attachments, and provide you with concise and helpful answers. 

Copilot is also a collaborative tool that enables you to share your Copilot insights with other meeting participants or save them for later reference. You can send Copilot answers to the meeting chat, or export them to other apps like Word, PowerPoint, or OneNote.

Copilot also has a feedback mechanism that allows you to rate the quality of the Copilot responses and help improve the system over time. You can give Copilot a thumbs up or a thumbs down, or provide more detailed feedback on how Copilot can improve its answers. Copilot will learn from your feedback and provide better answers in the future.

Copilot helps you get more value out of your meetings, by providing you with real-time information and insights that enhance your understanding and decision making.

Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot: The Copilot System: Explained by Microsoft and How Microsoft 365 Copilot works. 

What are the differences and similarities between Intelligent Recap and Copilot? 

Intelligent Recap and Copilot are both AI-powered features that help you get the most out of your meetings in Microsoft Teams. They both use artificial intelligence to analyze the meeting content and context and provide you with relevant and personalized information. However, they have different purposes and functionalities, as summarized in the table below. 

	What	Current Way	New Way
Intelligent recap in Teams Premium	Capture key meeting ideas and follow up actions	Attendees have to manually take notes and action items during the meeting	Automatically get consistent meeting notes and action items for attendees
	Listen to or watch what happened during a meeting	Spend hours after the workday watching meeting recordings and jumping around trying to find specific points of conversation	Save time with an auto-generated, immersive recap of a specific meeting or series, all in one place. Skim chapters and meeting topics that are automatically created and focus on the most relevant places for you to listen in
	Find times in the meeting relevant for you	Spend time sifting through for specific, relevant points just for you	Quickly find and jump to when your name was mentioned, when a screen was shared, when you joined/left the meeting, when your colleagues spoke, and by different topics throughout the discussion
Copilot in Teams	Stay on topic during a meeting	Spend valuable meeting minutes summarizing progress, discussing agenda, handling conflict and compiling feedback	Ask Copilot to automatically recap discussion and decisions made; proactively suggest agenda items and points to stay on topic, suggest questions, and even identify project and timeline conflicts.
	Author or generate content from discussions	Time and effort to brainstorm ideas, draft new content, and format concepts into diagrams	Get more done and save time by leveraging Copilot to brainstorm ideas on top of your own, synthesize and format information, build tables and diagrams, and organize text.
	Gain deeper insights from meeting, chat, and channel conversations	Spend hours watching meeting recordings, asking colleagues for input, or scrolling through chats to understand what happened	Quickly understand why a decision was made, different perspectives from the group, unresolved questions, and more with specific, context-baed questions to Copilot.

How to use Intelligent Recap and Copilot together 

To get the best results from Intelligent Recap and Copilot, you need to enable them in your Microsoft Teams settings. You also need to have a Microsoft Teams Premium subscription and Copilot license to access Intelligent Recap. Once you have enabled these features, you can use them in the following ways: 

- Before the meeting, you can use Copilot to prepare for the meeting by asking it questions about the meeting agenda, participants, goals, and background information. Copilot will search for relevant documents, emails, chats, and other sources of information and provide you with concise and helpful answers. You can also use Copilot to create a meeting outline with key points and questions to guide the discussion. 

- During the meeting, you can use Copilot to keep track of the conversation and capture important information. Copilot will listen to the meeting audio and transcribe it in real time. It will also identify areas of agreement, disagreement, options, decisions, actions, and follow-ups. You can ask Copilot questions or give it commands using natural language, such as "What are the pros and cons of option A?" or "Remind me to send an email to John after the meeting". Copilot will respond with relevant insights and suggestions on how to move forward. 

- After the meeting, you can use Intelligent Recap to review the meeting summary and highlights. Intelligent Recap will provide you with a comprehensive report that includes a transcript of the meeting audio, a list of attendees and their engagement level, a timeline of key moments and topics discussed, a summary of decisions made and actions assigned, a collection of files shared during the meeting, and a feedback survey for participants. You can also use Intelligent Recap to search for specific information or keywords within the report. 

Conclusion 

Intelligent Recap and Copilot are two AI-powered features that enhance your meetings in Microsoft Teams. They both use artificial intelligence to analyze the meeting content and context and provide you with relevant and personalized information. However, they have different purposes and functionalities, as Intelligent Recap provides insights after the meeting has concluded, while Copilot provides real-time value during the meeting. By using these features, you can improve your meeting experience and productivity, and get more out of your collaboration.