Microsoft's virtual intern Teams Facilitator will be late for the meeting

Microsoft has pushed back detection and question answering by the Teams Facilitator to November, after initially scheduling General Availability for June. Teams Facilitator is an AI assistant that joins meetings. It tracks agendas and can take notes, if enabled. The next stage in its development is to have it pop up and answer …

[elsergiovolador]

Facilitator

Should be saying:

- What has everyone been up to?

- Where is the Jira board

- Shall we start? Where is Tom

- Tom is late again. Tom what happened this time?

- Can someone send me the link to the board?

- Who got their hand up?

- Ok who should I start with?

- Tom you have 5 tickets in Progress. Should be close any?

[David 132]

Re: Facilitator

Don't forget "can everyone hear me?", "Presenter - you're on mute", and "can you make the text bigger on your screen/sharing please, cos I am too dumb to just ctrl-mousewheel enlarge it locally at my end".

That's 50% of the content of most Teams meetings right there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Facilitator

Does it know how to swap the PowerPoint Slideshow and Presenter notes view screens as our CEO and Information Technology Business Manager (read IT Secretary, even though secretaries were abolished 2 decades ago and Exec PA’s 10 years) don’t.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Teams — (n) a nightmarish phantasmagoria

A frightful nightmare from which you don't wake.

Teams. Teams Facilitator. Teams Faciltator Intern — a progression in horror.

I will be eternally grateful that I retired before I ever needed (=was required) to use this crap,

What flabbergasted me is that I could see some people just lapped this nonsense up like a kitten with cream.

[cyberdemon]

Who'd'a' Thunk It

Analysing N video streams in real-time and running an AI bot also in real-time to generate responses that an untrained intern might make, and generating again in real-time, fake video of a fake intern speaking those responses back into a meeting is er, far more expensive than an untrained intern! Shocker!

[Tom Chiverton 1]

"It is unclear why the feature is being delayed. ...

There are some privacy implications"

Answered ya own question. Nobody wants a LLM slop machine to guess at a plausible sounding answer.

[EdSaxby]

Waiting for a pause

This is going to fun in interviews where a pause is an intended way to create tension for one party to answer. We'll find the assistant start blabbing away instead.

I guess we will be seeing MS remove this toy within a year of implementing it.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Waiting for a pause

The off menu item better be easy to find, not under Things > More Things > Options > Irritating Things > Oh Please Don’t Turn Me Off

[retiredFool]

Isn't it obvious

The delay is because they tested it and not everyone was annoyed with it. They are working on enhancements so everyone tested absolutely despises it. Then, "ready to ship".

[Paul Herber]

Just wait until the AI assistant wants to take a comfort break. Just taking the piss.

[Daedalus]

The ghost at the feast

I used to (half-)joke that putting google scripts in a company website was like inviting the Chocky Factory to sit in all your meetings. Well, here we have Microsoft's very own "agent" being invited to Teams meetings where, no doubt, juicy tidbits will fall into its ears, to be cross-checked and correlated and inevitably used for the furtherance of the M$ mission.

If somebody has a good deal for you, it's because it's a good deal for them.