Making your Microsoft Teams Meeting Room Intelligent

Chris Fitzsimmons, Senior Solutions Architect at AVI-SPL and MVP Tom Arbuthnot explore Copilot and AI in Microsoft Teams Rooms and BYOD, what is available today, what is coming, and the value it brings

• Intelligent Meeting Recap and Copilot 
• Intelligent Speakers and speaker recognition in MTR and BYOD
• Intelligent Camera and identity recognition in the meeting room
• Hardware considerations for optimising AI experiences.
• The dilemma of AI progress and user preferences

Thanks to AVI-SPL, this episode's sponsor, for your continued support of the Empowering.Cloud community.

Transcript

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00:00:00:00 - 00:00:32:01
Tom
Welcome back to the Teams Insider podcast. This week I have Chris Fitzsimmons, a good friend who's now back in the UK, and he shares a wealth of knowledge around Microsoft Teams rooms and also Teams phone. This week we get into the whole Teams and AI conversation, so things like intelligent speaker, intelligent meeting recap, what customers are doing around rooms and AI and what the future holds for Teams and rooms

00:00:32:01 - 00:00:42:07
Tom
and AI. Really great conversation. Many thanks to Chris for the time and also many thanks to AVI SPL, one of the sponsors of Empowering Cloud. Really hope you enjoy the show.  

00:00:42:07 - 00:00:49:08
Tom
Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. got a good one this week. We're going to really ad hoc it this week, Chris, that I've just jumped on.

00:00:49:08 - 00:01:01:20
Tom
And no, no script, no prep we’re just going to get into one of our typical conversations, but recording it, which could be dangerous. Chris, you want to introduce yourself and, give, give everybody an update because you're back my side of the now.

00:01:01:20 - 00:01:05:04
Chris
On my side of the pond, too. Thanks. Chris Fitzsimons here. So

00:01:05:04 - 00:01:23:10
Chris
former UC architect for the Microsoft Practice at AVI SPL in the States. Now a senior solutions architect in the, UCC team, stayed with AVI SPL, very grateful for that. but, yeah, back in the back in the UK after ten years living and working in the US of A.

00:01:23:15 - 00:01:30:06
Tom
Awesome. So slightly different role, but still heavily involved in the in the the Microsoft sphere as far as AVI SPL is concerned.

00:01:30:08 - 00:01:36:06
Chris
All things Teams, Teams rooms, phone places all of the all of the above. and

00:01:36:06 - 00:01:41:02
Chris
you know, learning some new hats while I'm on the way here as an SA, so looking forward to a new challenge.

00:01:41:05 - 00:02:01:08
Tom
Awesome. So we we thought we'd pick the the topic of the year, which is AI, but specifically AI in the meeting room. Obviously, you just can't get away from this conversation as far as Microsoft and Copilot goes. but Chris, I'd like to get your kind of point of view of what's going on with actual customers, where the actual value is, what are you seeing happening?

00:02:01:08 - 00:02:04:05
Tom
So where should we start?

00:02:04:13 - 00:02:24:13
Chris
I was thinking about this yesterday on the train. There's an interesting inflection point right now. So there're a lot of customers who we’re in conversations with in the UK and have been in the US as well, frankly it's not really different anywhere, who are at the point now where they're expecting delivery of some of the promise

00:02:24:13 - 00:02:43:05
Chris
right? So we've there was a lot of as always with Teams and Teams rooms and Microsoft in general, there's a very kind of forward looking marketing approach that paints a picture, of a, of a, of a happy future state. And that's I don't I'm not objecting to that, by the way. I think that's a good way to do this.

00:02:43:05 - 00:02:45:01
Chris
Technology adoption takes a long time.

00:02:45:07 - 00:02:56:13
Tom
Yeah. Especially when you think about enterprises and the the kind of the level of time it takes to get something through in terms of them understanding it and having budget. It's a it's a year or multiple year cycle isn’t it?

00:02:56:15 - 00:02:57:04
Chris
You've got a, you.

00:02:57:04 - 00:02:58:00
Tom
Know.

00:02:58:02 - 00:03:21:07
Chris
These big boats take time to change course, right? But we've we've done all the adjusting and we've bought some licenses and we've invested in some technology. And now we're like okay, there's a couple of things from that picture that aren't quite here yet. Let's talk about that. which is good, by the way, because I think it demonstrates that the vision presented was the right one, and it continues to be the right one.

00:03:21:09 - 00:03:44:16
Chris
you know, people are interested in the features they're interested in and excited by the capability that's being delivered in many cases and promised in some. so I think that's good news, for Microsoft and for for the people in the, in the Teams universe. I think there's an interesting inflection right now where we've got some very, very capable hardware.

00:03:44:16 - 00:04:08:20
Chris
The first thing we saw was obviously the intelligent speaker, category, which gave us, you know, the identity of people who were talking in a, in a room as opposed to just on their laptop with their individual source and that but that was a category of device, with a certain set of capabilities. And then we saw much more recently, the intelligent camera start to appear in the shape of the, the Yealink device.

00:04:08:22 - 00:04:40:08
Chris
and pretty soon here, hopefully the Jabra Panacast 50. Both of those devices, you know, in-room intelligent pieces of hardware that we're doing quite a lot of work to deliver an experience around, you know, recognizing the humans in the room and all that kind of thing. And we we went through the process of registering our identities and recording our voice prints and our face identity in the Teams client and people are kind of got used to that idea, to enable those those, you know, those core experiences.

00:04:40:08 - 00:05:07:15
Chris
What we're about to see is the, the hardware almost take a step back. And I think that's very, very interesting because, certainly for enterprises where they've got lots and lots of rooms, hundreds of thousands of rooms, then investing in a piece of relatively expensive hardware for each of those spaces to deliver the experience is less appealing than the idea that the platform does the work, and we're just about to see, I think it's public.

00:05:07:17 - 00:05:14:05
Chris
It's public preview right now, which is intelligent speaker functionality for any Teams rooms, device.

00:05:14:05 - 00:05:19:07
Tom
Yeah. So not relying on those original intelligent speakers, which were really.

00:05:19:09 - 00:05:34:06
Chris
Quite limited to basically only certified for the Huddle room and you couldn't, connect two of them together. You couldn't use them with any other audio device. So you, you know, you're using a speak puck, which is cool for 3 or 4 people but not for 13 or 14 people.

00:05:34:11 - 00:05:47:18
Tom
Yeah. Yeah. So now now Microsoft's the reckon the cloud technology is good enough that they it doesn't matter as long as they're reasonable and certified Teams device that has reasonable mics, that's enough of a pick up for them to then use the cloud to intelligently work out who said what.

00:05:47:18 - 00:06:22:15
Chris
And it will only get better, right? They they've been quite, circumspect is the wrong word, but they've been quite clear that your mileage may vary, right? And that your the quality of your transducers is going to directly affect the, the accuracy, shall we say, of the transcription and the accuracy of voice recognition and if you've got, a slightly older bar that's been around for for five years and doesn't have the greatest in MEMS microphone technology inside it, then it's not going to be as good as, you know, a beamforming ceiling tile shaped microphone.

00:06:22:21 - 00:06:24:23
Chris
Right. They've been pretty upfront about that. Yeah.

00:06:24:23 - 00:06:33:21
Tom
Exactly. Yeah. You said, you know, you can that that the high end Shure multi ceiling tile DSPs and you're going to get better pick up and the cloud’s going to do better with that, it makes sense.

00:06:33:23 - 00:06:34:10
Chris
And our old friend the Meetup ones whilst

00:06:36:08 - 00:06:53:11
Chris
Delivering the experience probably won't be quite as good at it as you know a 910 or a 920 or something. It's probably worth us talking about the experience that we keep talking about, like what actually is the user experience and what's that? What's the upside, right? What are we talking about? So and then we can go back to the video stuff in a minute.

00:06:53:15 - 00:06:54:19
Chris
The

00:06:54:19 - 00:07:25:21
Chris
the key experience from Intelligent Speaker is, it was intelligent recap, right. The idea that and this is why I think Microsoft is so focused on this at the moment is essentially as a Copilot and Teams Premium unlocker, right? So with an intelligent speaker or intelligent speaker capability, Teams knows who's talking in a room and that allows their statements to be ascribed to them in a transcript or in an intelligent recap and in AI notes and in Copilot related meeting recap.

00:07:25:21 - 00:07:35:05
Chris
So that's really kind of vital for the realization of the potential of something like Copilot, right? Which is I know what Tom said.

00:07:35:05 - 00:08:00:09
Tom
Yeah, I think I think that's it, and because Copilot and an intelligent meeting recap even more so which is part of Teams Premium. So you don't even need to step up for Copilot because those are being so well received. Suddenly the room without intelligent speaker is at a disadvantage, I’ve got four people in the room. If the transcript just says room said X room said Y that kind of breaks the value prop of intelligent meeting recap or Copilot.

00:08:00:11 - 00:08:09:09
Tom
And I think that's a really easy value prop to understand that, that if I want to have good summaries of my meetings, I'm going to need to know who in the room said what.

00:08:09:09 - 00:08:11:00
Chris
Yeah, agree. And also

00:08:11:00 - 00:08:39:15
Chris
the cost of that. Right. So what I found really fascinating about the BYoD, the bring your own device feature set that that Microsoft deduced, in Q1 was that they added that functionality to devices that were essentially BYOD devices. So if you had a be an intelligent speaker piece of hardware in a BYOD room, so didn't even have a Team's Room Compute or Team Rooms pro license attached to it, you could still have intelligent recap, and I kind of I actually questioned that.

00:08:39:15 - 00:09:03:11
Chris
I was like, why are you doing that? And I had a conversation with the product group about this. Like, this seems like it's getting dangerously close to making BYOD too good, right? You know, you need some value in the Teams and pro license like it's a Copilot and an intelligent recap. And like we we want this to we want all rooms to be available to something like intelligent recap and not just, you know, the fancy room.

00:09:03:11 - 00:09:21:12
Chris
We need this to be available everywhere in every meeting, not just in some meetings when you were lucky enough to be able to book the Teams room, not the BYOD space. And I totally, you know, on reflection, that makes complete sense. But it was interesting how fast they moved towards that. and, you know, we're still right at the beginning of this.

00:09:21:12 - 00:09:38:00
Tom
And it's worth it's worth repeating. You said earlier that you do have to enroll your voice, so part of this is the individuals have to self-select to enroll on the Teams client, on their personal client. Yeah obviously the organization has to unlock that capability. and you know, there's various levels of acceptance or nervousness around that.

00:09:38:00 - 00:09:59:00
Chris
Quite a lot of steps to go. Right. You have to turn it on to the tenant. You have to enable the users via a user policy to be able to enroll. You have to have a meeting policy that says, yes, you can transcribe. and that's actually a cool change. It's coming pretty soon here, which is transcribe only, which would be a nice addition rather than having to video record everything and therefore get the transcription.

00:09:59:02 - 00:10:22:22
Chris
and then obviously once all of those things are done and you're invited to the meeting at the moment, then your voice will be compared to known voices for people that were invited and accepted, because there's a limit. And I think it's 20 at the moment of the number of voices it will actually go check against. It's not it's not taking Tom's voice and comparing it against the 35,000 people else in The Tenant.

00:10:22:23 - 00:10:29:04
Chris
Who has the voice recorded, too. There's a it's a herding of cats that has to be done first.

00:10:29:06 - 00:10:35:01
Tom
Setting itself up for success there, because it obviously knows the roster already knows who's enrolled. So it's yeah, that makes sense.

00:10:35:01 - 00:10:51:13
Chris
You can imagine that getting better in future, right? Because there's a couple of, let's call them edge or corner cases right now, which is that Bob wasn't invited. and the meeting started, and then we realized we actually really needed Bob involved, and somebody went in and knocked on his door, hey, can you come join the meeting? And Bob walks in and sits down.

00:10:51:13 - 00:11:02:07
Chris
Right now it doesn't know Bob because if Bob didn't, Bob was not on the meeting roster when the meeting began. Yeah. So there's room there for that to get better, right. And for that to start to get.

00:11:02:09 - 00:11:10:14
Tom
Yeah, it'd be great if you walked in and it started to go. Based on the voice signature and facial rec, I think Bob has joined. Can you confirm?

00:11:10:16 - 00:11:31:13
Chris
I think that would be. Yeah, that's an interesting little just thought about this. This is similar related to the, Team or Copilot Team, whichever way round it is, right? Which is now this, this virtual person. Yeah. You could invite them to the meeting because. Come in, Copilot, come and join us. you know, what about Bob? Bob’s feeling a bit left out

00:11:31:13 - 00:11:35:00
Chris
so I think that's a kind of interesting similarity.

00:11:37:00 - 00:11:58:10
Tom
And everything there from a licensing perspective that's, included in Teams Room Pro, as you say, you can do it with BYOD, so you're not needing yet to step up to Copilot, because something I'm seeing that's causing confusion in the market is obviously you have the Copilot personal license. But where do I need Copilot for these AI room scenarios that it's not it's not a direct attach.

00:11:58:10 - 00:12:06:10
Tom
You don't attach a Copilot license, so you can't license. These features come as part of either Rooms Pro is the is the thing that's unlocking the AI in the room really.

00:12:06:11 - 00:12:26:04
Chris
That's an interesting because actually that's a change, wasn't it? When premium Teams Premium first was launched, Intelligent Recap was an exclusive for it, and then pretty quickly Intelligent Recap got added to the Copilot license because there was obviously a bit of that, why do I need this one? And this one? but I think the thing to differentiate.

00:12:26:04 - 00:12:32:03
Tom
If I've just bought Copilot, I want that intelligent recap as well. I paid you $30.

00:12:32:05 - 00:13:02:07
Chris
Back for this. The the thing to the easy way to describe the difference is that intelligent recap is a post fact capability. Right. And Copilot is in real time. So you can literally. And I actually have this on the train the other day. This is a pretty cool Copilot story. I was on a train back from London in a team meeting with the guys in the States, and I went through a tunnel and it didn't actually kick me out, but it basically went to you're on hold because there was no signal when the phone popped out the other side of the tunnel, reconnected and it said, would you like Copilot to catch you

00:13:02:07 - 00:13:27:02
Chris
up? And it literally on my iPhone literally on my iPhone, said, Ron said this and Brandon said that, and Josh said the other. And I was like, that's okay. That's not that's me telling it to write a a SWOT analysis, that's actually a useful, really useful feature like Copilot for meetings. I think Copilot for meetings is, one of the better use cases.

00:13:27:03 - 00:13:47:08
Tom
I use it mid meeting quite a lot for like, someone said something. Can you remind me of what it is? And it just it's just scanning the transcript. But like you say, it's interactive whereas intelligent meeting recap is generated and static. You can't query it afterwards. You can't say summarize everything. Just Chris said it's a kind of static summary where as the Copilot is unlocking it.

00:13:47:10 - 00:13:59:12
Chris
It's really good for copy pasting to the people that weren't on the tenant that recorded the meeting too. But we just there's there's this current like stand off where we go, can I record it? No, I record it. Can I record it? And then the member gets up with an email.

00:13:59:12 - 00:14:09:01
Tom
Saying that, yeah, we're seeing that a lot of our customers now, we always try and host the meeting with our customer calls. It's like, I want to host it because I want the summary and they're doing the same thing. They want you.

00:14:09:02 - 00:14:17:05
Chris
To be able to record something. It's a very that's my dream. There is like you just get to both have.

00:14:17:07 - 00:14:18:12
Tom
yeah, you've all given consent.

00:14:18:12 - 00:14:31:20
Chris
Let's just record it. Like I'll record it in, record it, then we both get the benefit of it and it saves the sharing of information problem. You could write that one down for Microsoft. Tell them I want to take credit when that one happens.

00:14:31:22 - 00:14:32:14
Tom
So let's go.

00:14:32:15 - 00:14:52:10
Chris
We talked about audio a lot. I think the, the video piece is super interesting because it, it, it will it may eventually make the same migratory journey into the cloud, but I think it's going to take longer. So on the video side, the camera side, the intelligent camera capability, and I'm not going to use Intelliframe yet because that's confusing.

00:14:52:14 - 00:15:09:07
Chris
We'll get there. Intelligent camera capability is I've identified some people in the room and I labeled them right. So if Tom and I and a couple of others are sitting in a meeting room with an intelligent camera in it, and we've all registered our identities, our faces, and the tenants got it all turned on and blah, blah, blah.

00:15:09:07 - 00:15:17:23
Chris
And we were invited to the meeting, then my little box that it's generated, this grid view that it generates, then has Chris's name and Tom's name in it.

00:15:17:23 - 00:15:39:17
Tom
And yeah, so for the remote party they join and rather than getting the room just a giant view of the room and not knowing who's who you get, essentially the Celebrity Squares named up nicely, which is particularly useful if you're, you know, working in a big org or you're working with different teams knowing who's who visually, remotely is really, really useful. you know.

00:15:39:17 - 00:15:59:22
Chris
So I used to call them. Now I've moved back. I'm gonna have to call them Celebrity Squares. It's different. so that's part of it. And then the other part of it obviously is the panorama view as well as the head. So you still get your context right. You still get the whole room, but then you also get a kind of a more zoomed in headshot gives you better facial cues.

00:15:59:22 - 00:16:18:12
Chris
It lets you see what Tom really thought, even though he's at the back of the table. and so that intelligent camera capability has a identity, but it also puts you in the roster as well, right? Don't forget that. So if you're looking at the Teams meeting roster, you actually get room name and then Tom Chris Bob and Harry.

00:16:18:14 - 00:16:44:19
Chris
in that in that roster. And again that's based on who was invited, who's accepted. and it's pretty clever about that. I expect we'll see more of that cleverness come into some of the meeting invitation stuff that we're seeing as well. Like because you're starting to see in person meeting as an outlook option and some of the, you know, respond in person or responders remote, that stuff's finally kind of making its way out into the field.

00:16:44:21 - 00:16:59:04
Chris
and I said, I want to skip Intelliframe but let's go back to Intelliframe now, because Intelliframe is the description that Microsoft has given to the various features that I'm going to call them heads in boxes for sure, right? Heads in boxes either happens on the device or happens in the cloud

00:16:59:05 - 00:17:14:14
Tom
It’s tricky, because Microsoft are using that exactly Microsoft are using that term. I think that those are still sticking to the Intelliframe Edge is the camera vendors, the intelligence in their box, and Intelliframe in the cloud is the cloud takes a single feed from the camera and magically cuts it up in the cloud, basically.

00:17:14:18 - 00:17:35:03
Chris
And so that the telephone cloud version or the the render for any not so clever, let's call it dumb camera for the moment, sorry cameras, that doesn't label you and it doesn't identify you. It's all it's doing is saying that's a head, well, you know, a melon, as we call them, in AVI, but that's a melon. I'm going to put that in a box.

00:17:35:03 - 00:17:57:12
Chris
There's another couple of melons there. We're going to get boxes. And it's pretty good at identifying head shaped things. but it's certainly not attempting to identify who's head right. It's just. Yeah. And it's it's actually a really good experience. You got something like a Rally camera, right? The good old Logitech Rally Cam PTZ camera, PTZ. Sorry. Showing my, American there.

00:17:58:20 - 00:18:00:01
Tom
Yeah, coming out of that.

00:18:00:02 - 00:18:33:11
Chris
But what it does a great job of is just cropping into the bits you care about instead of all the white space in the room that you don't care about it. It gives you that. Yeah, you. But it certainly isn't identifying. And I've had some discussions about whether that would migrate slowly to the cloud, that naming, and, and the kind of the feedback I got was it's a lot harder because essentially what the intelligent cameras are doing is getting a fairly high fidelity image of the head and then actually sending the image.

00:18:33:13 - 00:18:49:11
Chris
So it's getting a still of my head, sending that to the cloud. And then in the cloud, the image processing is being done to go, that's Chris's head or that's Tom's head in the same way that the voice is being, interpreted or identified. But it's a lot harder.

00:18:49:13 - 00:18:59:20
Tom
It's theoretically a similar process, though, isn't it? Just it needs to be written in the cloud. The cloud could grab a still from a video stream. The resolution thing is interesting, isn't it? Because the camera has a natural advantage there.

00:18:59:20 - 00:19:24:04
Chris
And all of them are being sent up, right? So if you've got a 720p camera or 1080p camera, you're getting 1080p of the room and four people. Now you're going to cut all those people out you've actually got 100 pixels each. That's actually pretty difficult to run, or maybe not difficult. It's harder to run an image recognition algorithm on a handful of pixels versus a whole nice 540p or whatever it

00:19:24:06 - 00:19:44:02
Chris
as an intelligent camera is doing, but I think that's where we'll I was thinking about, like, what? What will Teams rooms do and look like. Now, obviously I don't have any idea what Microsoft's working on, but like in my mind, more and more of that intelligence needs to be cloud based to make it available in more and more places.

00:19:45:09 - 00:20:03:01
Tom
Yeah, it just makes sense as well. You unify the experience across cross-vendor cross-device. Like you say, BYOD is increasingly, you know, acknowledged by Microsoft as a, as a reality that there are lots of rooms that need that that won't have clever compute units at the edge necessarily that, that you could do.

00:20:03:01 - 00:20:04:12
Chris
And we've got them and think.

00:20:04:14 - 00:20:25:05
Tom
Is there anything else could go. So is there anything else on the Microsoft. So the other thing I want to get your opinion on before we wrap up, is the kind of multi-camera, AI direction like, that feels like a really interesting area. And that's an area where the OEMs come into play with different engines, different capabilities, which is really exciting.

00:20:25:07 - 00:20:43:09
Chris
Yeah, I think I, I think that's fascinating, and partly because there's limited amount of information about it. And that always bugs me because I want to know all the answers immediately and I'll keep getting told we don't know, or we're not telling you yet. Just tell me the answers. like how many people will. It's so multi-camera. Let's talk about well, let's not talk about let's talk about the laptop thing first.

00:20:43:14 - 00:21:05:13
Chris
So there's this idea that in a Teams Room environment where maybe there is someone who we don't have a good shot of because it's imagine we're sitting down an old fashioned two by two table and I'm behind Tom. so my head's obscured by this hand. but maybe my laptop has a better view of my face, and I've got my laptop open on the table.

00:21:05:13 - 00:21:22:08
Chris
So what's going to happen is teams is going to choose my laptop camera because it's better than the front of room shots. So it'll still do the grid view thing, right? The Intelliframe Hollywood Squares. But my Hollywood Square will be populated by a different camera. The laptop camera.

00:21:22:23 - 00:21:23:19
Chris
That's fascinating.

00:21:23:19 - 00:21:24:21
Tom
Which is which is really interesting.

00:21:24:21 - 00:21:26:05
Chris
Because we're about to find out how badly.

00:21:26:05 - 00:21:41:12
Tom
I've talked to a lot of people excited about what? Well, I've heard a lot of people excited about it because there's no hardware investment there and like the reality of meetings is nearly everybody brings a laptop in, so you've all brought personal cameras in and you're right, there's a great variance of, of laptop quality.

00:21:41:12 - 00:21:42:19
Chris
The potential is very exciting.

00:21:42:19 - 00:21:48:14
Tom
But also the cloud can do some. Yeah, the cloud can do some AI processing on that as well. So theoretically, again.

00:21:48:16 - 00:21:49:18
Chris
Laptops are quite nice.

00:21:49:22 - 00:21:50:09
Tom
Effective.

00:21:50:14 - 00:21:56:19
Chris
Hardware right. Especially if it's a copilot plus laptop. Maybe it's got some smarts.

00:21:56:22 - 00:21:57:21
Tom
Yeah I it's flying.

00:21:57:21 - 00:22:16:15
Chris
It's I think there's going to be. I mean I have some questions about how many people that will how many will it support in a room. How often is I going to work? Like how often do people actually bring their laptops? Will it change behaviors? I think there's like we just talked about there's a quality conversation there.

00:22:16:15 - 00:22:33:02
Chris
And I think that goes to all of this, by the way, because it's still garbage in, garbage out. Right? If you don't have good cameras and you don't have a good laptop, then there's only so much that image processing can do to make that better. So we're not getting away from the need to invest in decent quality equipment.

00:22:33:03 - 00:22:38:19
Chris
It's just going to we just discussing and changing what the equipment does.

00:22:38:21 - 00:22:53:08
Tom
Yeah. And that's the first scenario. Then you've got the the center-of-room cams which initially was you know, one OEM, then two, then three, then four. Like it feels like a lot of people are going to this center-of-room model. And then you've got the idea of having multicam.

00:22:53:22 - 00:23:23:17
Chris
Like choose your choice. I really like the choose your own adventure stuff. I think for me, that's the most interesting avenue is this idea that. And so let's talk about what that means. So before we get into why I like it, the multi-cam announcement is that if a room is equipped with multiple video cameras, then far end participants will be able to choose which of those multiple cameras that they select to be the one that the room tile is occupied by in their Teams stage.

00:23:23:17 - 00:23:47:22
Chris
So if I'm looking at a shot of the auditorium from the back of the room camera. But actually I'm interested in the reaction of the guy who's sitting in the front row, I can switch in my desktop Teams client say, I want camera two. That's wicked. I love the idea that as a consumer of a call, I get to pick the user experience or of the thing that I'm interested in.

00:23:47:22 - 00:23:56:12
Chris
And that's the same with Cloud Intelliframe, right? Which is that I do or don't like the feature or how it looks. I'll turn it on or off. And that's when.

00:23:56:12 - 00:24:09:00
Tom
Well what do you think about picking versus having the AI, the magic AI do direction because I see mixed reviews on things like dynamic zooming and panning and tilting where some people are, I really like it and

00:24:09:00 - 00:24:17:07
Tom
I think some people are like, it's just distracting. Well, we get the same thing with the AI. Do people want to pick their angles as opposed to having the AI direct for them?

00:24:17:07 - 00:24:33:15
Chris
Like three? There's three parts to this, isn't there? There's first of all, which is the as a consumer, I would like to be in control of my own experience, and by the way, we're not all created equal, so we don't all agree with each other about what view we want. the AI.

00:24:33:16 - 00:24:44:18
Chris
Element of that is good and some people will be fine, but I think they need we need a choice. I need to be able to choose whether I'm fine with the AI version of the direction.

00:24:44:22 - 00:24:46:06
Tom
So I could go into like, I.

00:24:46:09 - 00:24:48:02
Chris
Go, go auto, do what you like.

00:24:48:04 - 00:24:53:07
Tom
Best views. Oh yeah. Or I'm a, a power user.

00:24:53:11 - 00:25:14:12
Chris
Or I'm in a team belonging to. I report to somebody who I deeply care about their opinion of, and I want to know what they think of this idea before I choose my opinion of the idea, right. I, I'm interested in that. I'm a big, big advocate for people having choices, and then we forgot about the third group of people here, which is the people in the room.

00:25:14:14 - 00:25:34:05
Chris
And there's an awful lot of people that like, oh, I don't like how I look in this view and I'm like, well, okay, but this isn't really about what you think about this view, it's about whether it's useful to the individuals that you're trying to communicate with, and I think that's a fascinating debate, which because we have lots of people I don't like, self view,

00:25:34:05 - 00:25:51:20
Chris
I don't like that mode, it makes me look weird. I'm like, well, it's not for you. Turn it off. I mean, hide the self view if you can, because actually how you look outside the room, okay, yes, it's important, but it's not as important as the person consuming the call is being able to get what they need out of it from the accessibility perspective.

00:25:53:06 - 00:25:58:13
Chris
the last thing I lost my training. So on the other,

00:25:58:13 - 00:26:20:02
Chris
the other piece of this, that's that's really, really interesting is, The kind of legalities of that. Right. Like, can I is it okay for me to choose? Do I need to have a controlled environment? Am I trying to make a produced event? And also the difference between the OEM, let's call them the OEM features and the Microsoft features,

00:26:20:02 - 00:26:38:07
Chris
right? Which that's why I think cloud Intelliframe was so important when it came out, was it the first time that a user could switch? So if I've got a multi-camera system from Huddly or whoever, right, their intelligence isn't really exposed just to the user because it's the Huddly crew?

00:26:38:13 - 00:26:39:17
Tom
No, it's been the system.

00:26:39:20 - 00:26:40:10
Chris
For example.

00:26:40:11 - 00:26:40:21
Tom
The.

00:26:40:23 - 00:27:06:04
Chris
Really, really nice experience. We actually are watched an updated version of that the other day, but because it doesn't have hooks into Teams, I can't choose my own adventure in the same way that I could do if Teams had the feature, but that's creates a problem because it's like, well, how do I differentiate now as an OEM, if my smarts are not a unique thing because I can somebody else can override them and change.

00:27:06:06 - 00:27:29:11
Tom
I think there will be meaningful differences between how the OEMs implement this and how good the experience is and I've seen some of that. There are stark differences between the the different scenarios and how quick, how quick they're choosing to cut between users, what type of framing they're doing. So, you're right, there's a dilemma there because I love the innovation on the OEM side, but I kind of want to choose uniform experience for my users as well.

00:27:29:11 - 00:27:50:23
Chris
Yeah. I mean that comes down to. Chris's two cents on how to pick hardware in a meeting room, which is try and find one, maybe two vendors for your entire organization so that you don't get into a that room's better, I like this one more, or meeting meetings in France are better than the ones in England because we have different cameras.

00:27:51:01 - 00:28:10:15
Chris
not only is that a support nightmare, but more importantly, it's a user experience. Maybe not. More importantly, as importantly, as a user experience challenge. And and that can become a support nightmare, which is this one's behaving weirdly. No it's not. It's just behaving differently because it's a different vendor, that it's a waste of a ticket there and another five minutes of, of, you know, time spent.

00:28:10:15 - 00:28:37:04
Chris
So understanding the user experience, experiencing user experience as a business owner and going, this is the one where picking is really important because it allows you to take control because they're not all the same. Very easy for people to say, oh, Teams rooms are all the same, which from a UI perspective they are, but from a camera, microphone experience of how a meeting looks and feels and sounds.

00:28:37:04 - 00:28:43:21
Chris
They're not. And different people are going to have different views of what they want out of a room.

00:28:43:23 - 00:28:59:04
Tom
Definitely. Cool. So I think we've covered the the audio elements of AI, which I think arguably some of the strongest at the moment. What's happening in video and what the OEMs are doing. Chris, if people want to find out more from from you or from AVI SPL, where’s the best place to go the best thing to do?

00:28:59:06 - 00:29:10:20
Chris
Probably the AVI SPL website? www.AVISPL dot com? you can also find me in the various discords and community channels that the Teams.

00:29:10:21 - 00:29:13:08
Tom
We're gonna we're going to wrangle you back to the. Yeah.

00:29:13:08 - 00:29:15:03
Chris
I'll be in the user group on the 19th.

00:29:16:01 - 00:29:23:03
Chris
And I’ll be at Comsverse and various other places over the next month as well. So come find me cool.

00:29:23:04 - 00:29:29:12
Tom
Thanks, Chris. Okay.