Look, a lot of us who work in corporate environments dread meetings. Most of the time, they are unproductive or boring and keep us away from doing real work. Fortunately, Microsoft is trying to make meetings suck less with some very cool technology.
During the company's Build developer conference, Microsoft demoed a meeting using a 360-degree camera and a microphone array that is able to not only identify and greet individual meeting attendees but also transcribe what everyone is saying in the meeting in real time.
As the simulated meeting went on, the microphone array was able to accurately transcribe what each person was saying and display the transcription on the Surface Hub. This way, anyone else that is remotely connected to the meeting can see what's being said. This could go a long way for those needing assisting technologies due to impairments such as deafness. Additionally, the transcription can also be translated for meeting attendees who are not native speakers.
If that wasn't impressive enough, Microsoft is trying to leverage its advancements in artificial intelligence to act on what meeting attendees say. It will automatically log action items that are spoken by a person. For example, if the person says "I'll make sure to create that chart and email it to you," the person will automatically get a reminder in Microsoft Teams to create the chart and email it.
Microsoft also showed remote collaboration in real time between two people wearing the HoloLens while the other meeting attendees were able to watch on the Surface Hub screen.
There was obviously no release date for this new meeting room technology but it could possibly be included in the new Surface Hubs that are soon to be released. Regardless, this is sure to make meetings actually productive...hopefully.