Microsoft is pushing out some interesting AI-based updates to its Microsoft 365 apps to improve productivity, organization, and more.
The updates will add new AI and natural language features to Outlook, Teams, Microsoft Lens, and the Office mobile app and will soon be available to Android and iOS devices.
Microsoft Pushes Mobile Productivity
The handily titled post, “The evolution of mobile productivity, even when we’re a little less mobile,” fully acknowledges the work restrictions many Microsoft 365 users currently face. Still, for Microsoft, that’s no reason to slack and not push out updates for its mobile productivity apps.
We are investing in AI at scale to learn how people work, collaborate, and connect so we can help them stay in control of their day, and feel more balanced and organized.
The upcoming updates will see several Microsoft mobile apps receive updates, starting with Microsoft Outlook for iOS. The email app will receive “conversational AI technology” to make its Cortana integration an interactive tool.
In the example video, when asked, “Hey Cortana, play my emails,” the voice assistant happily reads back the latest emails to arrive.
Next up, the Microsoft Teams Cortana integration is “adding support for natural language queries,” which will allow users to search for files, meetings, messages, and links using regular expressions. So, instead of having to search a specific channel using a specific date frame or similar, you could ask “Find last week’s marketing meeting data” or similar.
The natural language update should make it easier to stay on top of data in your Microsoft Teams mobile app, which can quickly become overwhelming in a large organization or with a high volume of posts.
Office Lens users will be pleased to know that the app will “be able to recognize English handwriting and text,” adding a well-requested feature to one of the best scanning apps on the market. Furthermore, Office Lens is receiving a new name: Microsoft Lens.
Another interesting feature coming to Microsoft Lens is the integration of video into Microsoft Teams Chat. The new integration will allow your team to record video, annotate it, make changes with some basic editing tools, and more.
Microsoft 365 Micro Tasking Shortcuts
Another interesting feature coming to the Microsoft 365 mobile apps is micro-tasking shortcuts.
These “mini workflows” will streamline everyday processes within Microsoft 365 apps, such as creating and linking to a poll, integrating forms into your document, integrated web-view pages into your messages, and more.
The micro-tasking shortcuts will integrate throughout the mobile Microsoft 365 apps, making it easier to manage data and hopefully increase your productivity.
