Highlights:

  • Participants in Teams can change their language during a meeting and make a real-time language selection.
  • The new Teams tool sounds like a straightforward and dependable approach to make remote meetings that much easier.

Microsoft recently unveiled the addition of a new feature to Microsoft Teams that it developed in unison with the Welsh government. With this, organizations and governmental entities will find it simpler to host meetings in several languages.

This will replace earlier workarounds, which were inconvenient to use. But there’s a catch: Human translators will do the translation.

Microsoft announced the recent triumph on its official website. With this new approach, designated interpreters will be permitted to translate throughout a Teams meeting, and attendees can choose whatever language they want to hear. Bilingual meetings, or even ones with speakers from around the world who speak different languages, could be significantly improved by this technology.

With this feature requiring the assistance of human interpreters, it will be useful only at scheduled meetings where those interpreters will be permitted to attend. Participants in Teams can change their language during a meeting and make a real-time language selection. The Microsoft Teams app will handle this without requiring additional actions.

It is not a coincidence that the feature was implemented in collaboration with the Welsh government. According to the blog post by Glyn Jones, the chief digital officer for Wales, live interpretation will be essential for the operation of the government. Wales is bilingual; thus, many gatherings call for translation services.

“I don’t think you can underestimate the impact this will have on organizations that operate bilingually or multilingually. We’ve had positive feedback from the people who tested it with us. The interpreters and the people listening think it’s great,” Jones praised the new feature.

The local government began using Teams early in 2020, and before that, it had to pay interpreters to physically attend meetings. With the pandemic outbreak, translators had to devise a workaround, which involved watching the meeting on Teams and translating it over the phone. Aled Jones, a co-owner of the translation business that collaborates with the Welsh government, said, “It wasn’t perfect, but it got the job done.”

Jones described the feature as “ground-breaking” since everything takes place within the same app, and Teams can now give a seamless, easy-to-use experience while still being inclusive.

The new Teams tool sounds like a straightforward and dependable approach to making remote meetings that much easier, which is always good. However, it’s not quite the futuristic live artificial intelligence-based translation that many firms are working on or are currently providing.