In december 2020, Microsoft announced a lot of cool features for MS Teams. In this article, we will focus only for Teams live events and features that people could use at conferences, international business meetings or on similar events.
One of the major improvements for live events is increased capacity limits. Now the limit for live events is increased to 20,000 attendees, and users could create 50 events simultaneously across one tenant. Event duration is increased to 16 hours per broadcast. In my opinion one of the most improvments is supporting new languages for real-time translation in live events. Now you could create live translation into Japanese, Korean, French, French-Canadian, Spanish, Spanish-Mexican, Traditional Chinese, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Hindi-Indian, Portuguese-Brazilian, and Russian into up to 50 different languages. Live Captions are first realised in Ignite Conference, and they make meetings more inclusive, giving participants another way to follow along with the conversation, and addressing the needs of participants with different hearing abilities or language proficiencies. These feature is in public preview right now and its only available in US English. Hopefully it will include all the languages that are supported in Azure Cognitive Services.
How can we use this?
To turn on live captions in a Teams meeting, hit the menu ellipses and click Turn on Live Captions (preview). If you could find this option, you must contact your admin person. Admins can enable and disable live captions in the Teams Admin Centre (TAC) by changing one of the meeting policies. The choices are disabled or disabled with user override.
