Microsoft Teams' Together Mode to Gain Support for Smaller Groups
Microsoft is working to allow smaller meetings to take place in its Together Mode, which uses artificial intelligence to put multiple users in the same virtual space.
Launched last year during the peak of the global health crisis, Together Mode for meetings uses AI to place everyone on a call in a shared room-like environment, like a coffee shop or an auditorium, rather than the patchwork gallery view that typically comprises large Teams meetings.
The idea behind the feature is to better replicate real face-to-face meetings by taking people out of their home environments and custom backgrounds, thereby making it easier to pick up on facial expressions, body language, and other non-verbal cues.
Together Mode can accommodate up to 49 people at a time, and currently only becomes available when at least five people have joined the meeting. Soon, however, Microsoft is making it so that the feature can be used with just two people.
Support for smaller gatherings in Together Mode is currently limited to the
developer Beta preview, but will soon be available for all. If you want to try accessing the preview, click the ellipsis next to your profile picture, select About, then tick Developer Preview. If the option doesn't appear, it may be because of the way your work account is set up.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to the Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Kosutami has revealed...
Apple Vision Pro, Apple's $3,500 spatial computing device, appears to be following a pattern familiar to the AR/VR headset industry – initial enthusiasm giving way to a significant dip in sustained interest and usage. Since its debut in the U.S. in February 2024, excitement for the Apple Vision Pro has noticeably cooled, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Writing in his latest Power On...
Top Rated Comments
It's… some of the UI decisions that get me. It really feels like a web app (because it basically is), and like few of its developers understand all the nice things you can do with a GUI app.
Just off the top of my head:
* if you scroll up in message history, instead of fetching from a local cache, it keep asynchronously downloading more messages from the server (and sometimes, very slowly at that). Imagine if your mail client, when scrolling down your inbox, needed to keep looking for more messages, rather than keeping them all local. This makes it very annoying to scroll back to "hey, what did we talk about the other day?" scrub scrub scrub wait wait wait ugh. At least let me configure this.
* it took them a long time but you can finally pop out a single conversation into its own window. But for some reason, they decided to keep this in sync. So don't think you can scroll up there to look something old up, then in the regular window stay at the bottom. As soon as something new happens, both windows will scroll to the bottom. What?
* whoever implemented viewing images hasn't yet had this insight of multiple windows. The image opens within the main window. There's no resizing it unless you also resize the regular window. There's no popup. Why wouldn't you open attachment previews in a separate window?
* why are menu items like Settings in a weird "…" menu when the menu bar is right there? (Firefox also does this. Worse, it puts some items in both a hamburger menu and the regular menu bar. Why?)
But things like conversations, video calls, screen sharing, file transfer, etc. do work quite well.
Still, it's frustrating. A decade and a half, Adium wasn't great at file transfer and didn't do video calls or screen sharing. But its usability, customization and just joy of using it were vastly superior.
[HEADING=2]Microsoft Teams' to Gain Support for Smaller Resource usage on the Mac because it's a hog[/HEADING]