Microsoft’s new Teams Premium tier integrates with OpenAI’s GPT-3.5

Teams Premium, a new tier of Microsoft Teams now generally available to customers, uses the new version of GPT — the OpenAI artificial intelligence engine and database on which ChatGPT is based — to underpin the AI capabilities that will be available to users of the new version of the collaboration application.

Originally rumored to be priced at $10 per user per month, the new tier will carry a $7 per month price tag through June, before increasing to $10 in July.

Although most of the newly available features were first announced at Microsoft’s Ignite event in October 2022, the use of OpenAI’s Chat GPT-3.5 was unveiled just this week as the new tier became generally available.

Teams Premium will use “Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected — whether it’s one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars,” Nicole Herskowitz, vice president of Microsoft Teams, wrote in a blog post.

GPT-3 enables new Teams meeting capabilities

GPT-3.5 will be used to divide Teams meeting recordings into chaptered sections, generate titles and section descriptions, add personalized timeline markers that show when a user joined or left a meeting, as well as highlighting when a name was mentioned and when a screen was shared.

Microsoft has long been a supporter of OpenAI, investing $1 billion in the company in 2019 to support its quest to create “artificial general intelligence,” and in 2020, it became the first company to license GPT for inclusion in its own products and services.

GPT, which stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer, is a language model developed by OpenAI that uses deep learning techniques for natural language processing (NPL) to generate text that is remarkably similar to human writing. GPT-3.5  is the latest version of the model.

In January, Microsoft announced the third phase of its long-term partnership with OpenAI, with a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment from the tech giant meant to help accelerate breakthroughs in AI, and the ability for Microsoft to access new AI-based capabilities it can resell or build into its products.

On February 1, OpenAI announced that it was piloting a subscription plan called Chat GPTPlus. The $20 monthly plan will give users priority access to the chatbot, including faster response times and guaranteed reliability during peak hours — times when users of the free version may have access blocked due to the load on the system.

In addition to the AI capabilities underpinned by GPT-3.5, the premium version of Microsoft Teams will offers users advanced security features, such as the ability to watermark meetings, turn on end-to-end encryption for meetings with more than 50 participants, and add sensitivity labels for virtual meetings that will prevent participants from copying and pasting meeting chats.

Users will also be able to turn on live translation for captions from 40 languages, while customers hosting webinars will have access to advanced capabilities such as registration waitlist and manual approval, separate virtual greenrooms for presenters and attendees before an event begins, and the option to better manage what attendees see — allowing them to only see shared content and participants you bring on-screen, for example