Navigating Microsoft Teams using your grade-level foreign languages could soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new update.
The video conferencing tool has announced another update to its translation facilities with the ability to choose live subtitles in the language of your choice.
When starting and setting up a call, Microsoft Teams users will be able to select live captions in their preferred language, helping them better understand other participants.
Microsoft Teams live captions
Microsoft Teams hopes the update will allow for more engagement when calling between teams or colleagues from different countries.
"This will help users to fully participate in meetings where the language spoken may not be the most comfortable language to use," the company noted.
In its post on the official Microsoft 365 roadmap (opens in a new tab), the company noted that the change is due to the help of Microsoft Cognitive Service's speech translation capabilities. Ostensibly part of the company's Azure cloud platform, Microsoft says its tools offer powerful and fast real-time translation services.
The tool is listed as still in development, but its general availability date is scheduled for September 2022, which means we may not have long to wait. Once released, the update will be available to all Microsoft Teams desktop users worldwide.
The news is the latest in a series of updates to Microsoft Teams and its translation capabilities, as the company looks to make the platform more useful to users around the world.
This includes recent announcements about so-called "smart translation" for Microsoft Teams Mobile users.
Coming soon to Android and iOS users, this feature will allow users to quickly translate messages into a foreign language, ensuring there are never any delays or errors.
Microsoft also recently adopted Z-Code AI technology to significantly improve the quality of its production translation models.
Another move in early 2022 allowed Microsoft Teams to also have access to a large network of professional interpreters who connect to meetings on demand. Once a session has started, Microsoft Teams users can switch between the original audio stream and the interpreter's translation via a drop-down menu.