In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:

>An amazing new feature from Microsoft Streams

>How can AI power up your Teams meetings?

Transcript:

In this episode of the Power Up Project, we're talking about Microsoft Stream introducing facial detection and automatic transcription.

Hey, welcome back to the Power Up Project. I'm your host for this episode, Ben Love. And today we're going to be talking about one of the Microsoft products that we've mentioned before, which is Microsoft Stream. It's kind of like a private organisational YouTube, if you will, where you can upload your videos. But specifically we're going to be talking a bit about some amazing new features that Microsoft have brought to Stream where they're really bringing the power of a lot of their artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities to bear on the Microsoft Stream products. Now, the good thing is of course you don't need to worry about it being AI and machine learning and all of this jargony stuff. All you need to know is that there are these great new features in Microsoft Stream. So let's get started on that.

There's a couple of little things that I think are really powerful here, but I'm kind of AI stuff, so I'm going to touch on these other ones first. The first thing is that you can watch videos in Microsoft Stream on the go, that is on your mobile device, while you're offline. Now this is fantastic. So, that means that there is a little caching feature building in there so that your device can actually pre-download some of these videos for you so that if you're sitting on the plane or your bandwidth is rubbish, wherever you happen to be travelling, you can still get access to those videos and watch those videos. Now this could be particularly useful as well combined with another excellent little feature that's come through, which is when you use Microsoft Teams to conduct meetings, for example, video conferencing meetings and we're all using Teams, right? Because, it really is the big thing at the moment. It really is where Microsoft is putting a lot of their focus. It is also the thing that's going to be replacing Skype as well, and that particular timeline is accelerating. So, if you do use Skype for some of these things and you haven't yet had a look at Teams head on over to have a look at Teams, it's something you really need to be doing.

So of course, given that we're all conducting our video meetings and our conference calls using Teams these days, one of the powerful features of that is that we can record the meeting. So, just click on the record button in our meeting there and Teams will automatically capture what happens there, the video, the audio, so on and so forth. But the good thing now is what it then does with that video recording, because what it does now is it automatically puts it into Stream. It automatically puts it into your Microsoft Stream video library. That means that it can then be made available to anybody on your team who happened to miss the meeting. There's always somebody isn't there, there's somebody who says they're going to be at the meeting, but then now they, I don't know, they call in sick, which is fine, or they get called out on an important client meeting or you know what? They just don't turn up. We've certainly had that in the past. So at least this way the meeting is automatically recorded, automatically uploaded into your Microsoft Stream video library for that person to catch up on. And of course now they can also catch up on it on their mobile device and even offline, which I think is pretty cool.

So let's move on to some cool new AI powered features though. The first one is facial detection. Now this is a bit of AI that Microsoft to bringing to bear on Stream videos, which they're really using for what they call speaker timelines.