October was another banner month for new features in Microsoft Teams: Live Translated Captions and suggested replies in group chats were among the key additions, Microsoft notes.

“Ignite was here and gone before we could blink,” Microsoft’s Holly Lehman writes in the announcement post. “The cool thing [is], Ignite shared so many of our incredible investments, announcements, and new fun features we are all extremely excited about. Learn about new integrations for PDFs, ways to collaborate using video, and the enhancements for frontline workers. We thank you for being as enthusiastic about the October features as we are!”

Key new features include:

Assign seats in Together mode. Together mode puts meeting participants in a virtual space like rows of seats, helping them feel like they’re in the same room. And with this update, meeting organizers and presenters can now assign seats to participants in Together mode, so they can be just as terrible as real meetings.

Shared content in a pop-out window. Now, when you’re sharing content during a meeting, you can pop out that content into a separate window so you can see it and the meeting participants side-by-side. This capability was previously available for Teams’ chat, meeting, and calling experiences.

Live Translated Captions (Teams Premium). Teams Premium members can now get AI-powered live translated captions from 40 spoken languages during meetings. That’s pretty incredible.

Improved companion mode for Android users. The companion mode in Teams for Android now sports single-tap meeting join, quicker access to chat, participant list, live reactions, and raise hands, and auto audio-off at meeting start so there’s no echo.

More certified devices. Microsoft announced three new third-party Teams-certified devices, the Crestron Flex dedicated conferencing companion with display, the Sony YY2969 earbuds, and Neat Frame, a portable, portrait-oriented personal video device that pairs with your laptop.

New PDF experience. You can now configure Adobe Acrobat as your default app for viewing and editing PDFs in Teams.

Suggested replies in group chat. As we see on mobile messaging apps, Teams will now present a selection of one-click, machine learning-based suggested replies when you’re engaged in a group chat.

File management. Teams has long had a Files interface for shared files, but now you can delete or rename files in a channel via the “More” option.

There’s more, but check out the original post for the full list.

Tagged with Microsoft Teams