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 questions if it detects a knowledge gap. For example, somebody might ask "What is this Teams Facilitator thing?" and, if nobody answers, Facilitator will show a prompt offering to find an answer. It sounds like a marginally more irritating version of Clippy, and getting it into a state where it is declared generally available has proved difficult for Microsoft. When Microsoft added the capability to its roadmap in April, the expectation was that it would roll out in June. Then July. Then August. Then September. The latest update schedules it for a targeted release in November and worldwide general availability in mid-December. It is unclear why the feature is being delayed. It might be that determining whether a lull in conversation actually signals a question needing an answer is trickier than expected. Or it could be that whatever a search turns up doesn't make sense in the context of the meeting. The Register asked Microsoft to explain the holdup, but the company has yet to respond. There are some privacy implications around the feature, although it is worth noting that Facilitator must be included in the meeting, and removing the assistant will stop the behavior. According to Microsoft: "The feature processes meeting conversations in real time to detect knowledge gaps and generate responses," which indicates extra data processing and, of course, AI capabilities are required to generate responses in the correct context. That said, the premium edition of Microsoft 365 Copilot is required, so the data privacy ship could have likely long sailed. Also, if web search for Copilot is disabled, there won't be any responses anyway. Still, having to wait a few more months before a perky virtual assistant chimes in with "it looks like you're having a heated debate about the benefits of AI. Would you like some help with that?" is probably no bad thing... (R)