There is some ML functionality built into Visual Studio now a days (intellisense + some auto complete). But I don't think they market it as a separate product.
"With intelligent recap in Teams premium, you’ll get automatically generated meeting notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights to help you get the information most important to you, even if you miss the meeting."
There are some startups working on these solutions too right?
> Version 4.0 of Manna was also the first version to enforce average task times, and that was even worse. Manna would ask you to clean the restrooms. But now Manna had industry-average times for restroom cleaning stored in the software, as well as “target times”. If it took you too long to mop the floor or clean the sinks, Manna would say to you, “lagging”. When you said, “OK” to mark task completion for Manna, Manna would say, “Your time was 4 minutes 10 seconds. Industry average time is 3 minutes 30 seconds. Please focus on each task.” Anyone who lagged consistently was fired.
Feels like Amazon took some inspiration from that.
ai and neural networks aren't needed for this sort of work metric monitoring. You'd have found this in factories decades ago.
The situation that is described in Manna is merely something that would occur under complete free market capitalism, and assumes that people would not change or adapt to meet the challenges of automation.
One is a human, the other is some AI hoovering up everything I say an adding it to their database which can be used in every other instance of Teams in the world. I'd say that's a meaningful difference.
The people in the meeting were invited. They have limited memory. They have respect for each other and only share as appropriate. They are not logging everything said to people's dossiers to be used for other purposes.
Now we need all the toxic people automatically flagged and fired.
Or even better... moderate people by cutting off their mic: "Please stay on topic", "Don't interrupt others", "Don't ignore other participants", "Please answer the question", etc.
An AI meeting moderator would make work so much better.
The status quo is a joke. The threshold for considering behavior toxic is too high.
Now we have the technology to end the bullshit.
If you are interrupting, ignoring others, bluffing, lying, manipulating, gaslighting, being a sycophant, playing dirty... you are no longer playing the game. There are ways of achieving things that do not involve cheating.
If you disagree, then I have to ask you: are you really being collaborative and inclusive, working for a common goal, or you are simply being selectively inclusive and collaborative up to the point it's time to sabotage others?
There are people out there that get ahead by being irrational, selfish and overall horrible. Let's get them out of the way and let the best ideas win.
Human intelligence is tainted with lower forms of intelligence from less evolved animals. The brain is structurally a monolith where structures responsible for advanced cognitive brain functions are built on top of older brain structures from millions of years prior.
Primitive animals are less social, less collaborative and cannot collaborate in large groups. There are vestigial behaviors from them that arise once in a while in humans. It's time to evolve and press the mute button on lower ape behavior. Humans cannot do it reliably.
Automatically detecting and flagging selfish individuals that cannot work in groups and actively sabotage their group by preventing the best ideas from prevailing is something worth trying.
The reason everyone is seeing therapists is because some people are determined to ruin the work experience for others. We can do better.
We already employ profanity filters in multiplayer games. We also have rating systems in games that allow peers to flag toxic behavior after a game session for review. These have helped limiting the harm caused by toxic players.
Those are simple low tech solutions that could be added to videoconferencing applications.
Did someone act toxic during a meeting? Allow participants to report a toxic interaction, with an AI generated transcript + recording.
Then you can go one step further and build the future of HR playbook enforcement:
"Meeting participant #1234, you are engaging in toxic behavior and are in direct violation of the HR playbook page 113 section 9: please stop disrupting the meeting and shut the hell up to avoid disciplinary action. You have 10 seconds to comply. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...". /s
But jokes aside... Today we have great sentiment analysis capabilities. There is a subset of the English language you should never use at work. We can also detect if someone is yelling. We can flag highly offensive terms. There are ways in which we can apply technology in a sensible way to improve the work experience, to limit the harm caused by the worst types of behaviors including but not limited to violence.
We can also use technology to hold HR accountable to enforce the HR playbook.
I guess when we get to have AGI agents, they will start replacing HR, even though I doubt this will sit well with anyone. Again, it’s dystopian. Maybe in a Demolition Man world.
Yeah, but if you don't have the standard Midwestern Accent, you're fucked. As an Australian I'd estimate that ~70% of everything has an error in the transcription.
I see a great use case of it. we can schedule product training sessions on teams and it will generate notes.. all the knowledge will be documented too.
I get so tired of what would seem like very simple things breaking in Teams. All this last week I've been recording conference calls with Powerpoint. I understand there's a recording function within Teams, but it started out singleplayer with no one watching the demonstrations of my processes. Anyway, Teams will pop up notifications while I'm recording and it didn't used to. Hell, I'll be sharing my screen in Teams and it will show my notifications over the screen share.
So far I've been lucky that nothing surprising has been leaked to others or wound up in recordings, but this didn't used to happen.
Or a Windows app that doesn't crash and fuck up all the time. Or a Mac app that doesn't crash and fuck up all the time. Or a Linux app that isn't total and complete garbage. It's such a steaming pile of shit to try to do basic things with, but they're spending time on this shit.
I don't use Teams as a daily driver, but I would be a candidate for a paid upgrade pack that made it have the polish one expects from an app built by a public company. In particular, the emoji are terrible.
For some reason, intra org Teams calls slow down Office (from outlook to Excel) down significantly at my place. Teams, outside the call, becomes basically unusable. Funny thing is, when having calls with people outside the org, everything is running just smooth and fine...
In my case, I mostly use Linux, so I use the online versions of the office apps, except for Teams. The other day I installed the local clients on a newish computer (11th gen i7, win 11) and was shocked by how sluggish Outlook felt.
I understand the online versions lack some features, but for my use-case they are great.
My private daily is Linux, too. It is dual boot, mostly for gaming and because I am too lazy to figure out wireless scanning under Linux. Libre Office runs under Linux, school teams, some fames and scanning under Eindows 10. Plus, I can keep my kids stuff seperate from mine for the most part.
That's why we're building FossTeams [1], an open source client for Microsoft Teams (:
The idea is to have a backend [2], powered by a library [3] that does the heavy lifting and a / multiple frontends to be used with that (e.g: CLI[4], Web frontend[5], Flutter app[6]).
We're looking for contributors! If you hate Teams and want to improve an Open Source version, PRs are welcome (:
I don’t think it can be really improved as long as Microsoft can sell this slow unstable piece of crap into all the big corporate by shameless bribing.
I used to work in a big corporate, suddenly all teams has to change to MS team even the current software works just fine. I just decided to quit.
That's why this uses the same client ID as Microsoft Teams and connects to the same backends.
Don't get me wrong, the Teams servers aren't the fastest out there - but processing a 50 MB JSON with Javascript (well, Angular) is probably not needed at all if your goal is just to see a chat message. We do that heavy lifting on the server side (that anyways runs locally on your PC), so that the client can get the messages without all of the mess.
You're brilliant martyrs, but it's such a shame that Teams is just universally accepted as a new enterprise thing. I've never really seen such an anticompetitive move by Microsoft in the last decade, but Teams has taken on both Slack and Zoom and friends and they shove it "for free" down their enterprise customers' throats. It's crying out for a competition authority investigation and a compulsory breaking up -- not just a FOSS client.
Of course, but in the meantime since we can't change the situation (me and others who have been forced to use Teams) you have to stop the bleeding for those who are truly suffering from M$ + Management's decisions
Can you elaborate on this point a bit? It seems to me that you are saying Microsoft should not be allowed to release their own version of Slack and Zoom for free. I don't see the argument for that, especially since Microsoft itself has in the past released free software that does essentially what these other tools also do, and largely inspired them (Skype, for example).
> It seems to me that you are saying Microsoft should not be allowed to release their own version of Slack and Zoom for free.
That is exactly what I'm saying, because it is against EU competition law as Microsoft has a dominant position in the market -- the "plain English" guide to competition law simply states: [1]
If your company has a large market share, it holds a dominant position and must take particular care not to:
• charge unreasonably high prices which would exploit customers
• charge unrealistically low prices which may drive competitors out of the market
• discriminate between customers
• force certain trading conditions on your business partners
Microsoft does arguably all of these with different products to some level. Zoom, Slack, Discord etc are all paid-for products with a cost that, prior to February 2020, companies paid for separately. Microsoft then came along with Teams and released it as part of a certain tier of M365 subscription for free. Whilst Zoom and friends have not been driven out of the market, they have suffered as a result of it and what was a burgeoning industry, including with "freemium" or "paid support" FOSS models like Jitsi, have suffered as the corporate behemoths of the world use Teams. The real proof of the pudding is the fact that most users hate Teams: it's widely regarded as being not as good as its competitors and yet is massively used. Why? Monopolistic business practices.
I understand where you (and the law) are coming from, but when it comes to software it is hard to say what are "unrealistically low prices". Slack and Zoom also have free tiers, so how is it unrealistic for Microsoft to offer that as well? Looking at Google for example, would you say that they should be forced to charge for their services to reflect their costs? I doubt that either of these would be a good thing.
> it as part of a certain tier of M365 subscription for free.
So is it free or not? If it's part of a subscription, it's just included in the cost. The subscription already included a whole suite of different software, what makes Teams special in that regard? Who decides that Teams is a separate product and not just a feature of the O365 product?
These are all good questions, and you could have asked them about IE and Windows – where it was found to be anticompetitive behaviour. The answer to "who decides" is the national competition and markets authorities of the EU's member states, or the EU's competition commission. The main issue from a legal point of view is whether Microsoft is exploiting its dominant position in business services to make its competitors suffer unduly, if it was not dominant in another area – which you could make an argument for, in my opinion.
What sets this project apart from the MS Graph API? Are there any API features that Graph does not have?
I have built an alternative Teams client for smart glasses using only MS Graph and Azure Communication Services and it can already do most interactions related to chat/meetings/org etc.
It's not using the MS Graph API and it's copying what the Teams Desktop client is doing.
This gives you a way to run an alternative client in corporations where you don't have the possibility to use third party apps. On top of that, since it's not using the Graph API, we might get better features that will take long time to be available in the Graph API.
I think it's funny that casual hobbyists can easily outproduce Microsoft's supposedly world class engineering organization. It's not even a question in anyone's mind either. You guys know you're going to beat them (or already have), everyone here takes it as a given, even the engineers at MSFT probably know it.
Even if they try to stop you guys, they probably won't be able to pull it off unless they can manage it in court
Why is that funny? I think it is normal that a hobby team working in a silo on an alternative client with a low amount of users move faster than a full engineering organization working on a mass rolled out product used in corporate environment all over the world.
For a new feature the hobby team can just hack away for a few nights, push the release and they are done.
The engineering org needs to plan and coordinate the feature across multiple teams (web app, desktop app, mobile app, Graph, teams admin panel, o365 admin panel,...) and then make sure it fits well into the rest of the MS infrastructure (policies, permission scopes, IT admin controls, licensing, auditing,...). Legal might need to be involved.
And then after aligning all those teams and waiting for each team to prioritize and do the work it needs to get into the MS roadmap as well going through the usual stages (private preview, public preview, General Availability). And once it hits GA it needs to be supported for many years.
We'll see. We're doing nothing more than using undocumented APIs and in the end these clients are not competing against Microsoft Teams (but actually bringing / keeping more user base there). On top of that, we provide the code as MIT, so Microsoft can reuse the code for themselves.
If they still send a cease and desist letter, we'll probably comply and make sure the code is archived somewhere for people to continue / use the project (:
TL;DR: I would consider a cease and desist a success, and hope that Microsoft reuses the code
I appreciate your efforts, because Teams is so terrible, but I'd love to avoid yet another chat application with its own UI. Pidgin is great for consolidating many of these walled garden chat services (e.g. Discord/Slack) into a unified UI, do you have any plans to develop a libpurple plugin?
Once we have a solid base library, it can be included as a plugin everywhere.
We've had already requests for a Weechat plugin [1], and Pidgin / Matrix are good candidates too.
Could someone please compete with GPT-3? This is getting ridiculous how far ahead OpenAi is getting, despite Google probably having better tech. It seems nobody else has the big brass balls of the OpenAI guys to put a large language model out there and deal with the consequences. Yann LeCun is on Twitter saying this isn't a big deal[1], but where's Facebook's LLM that's available to the public?
The response quality of BlenderBot is pretty bad compared to ChatGPT
Example question: What’s a covariance matrix?
BlenderBot: Principal component analysis is a popular technique for analyzing large datasets containing a high number of dimensions/features per observation, increasing the interpretability of data while preserving the maximum amount of information, and enabling the visualization of multidimensional data.
ChatGPT: A covariance matrix is a symmetric matrix that describes the covariance between multiple variables in a given dataset. The diagonal elements of the matrix represent the variance of each variable, and the off-diagonal elements represent the covariance between each pair of variables. The covariance matrix is used in multivariate statistics to understand the relationships between different variables and to perform statistical inference and hypothesis testing.
I tried it. It can't answer basic encyclopedia facts (e.g How many people died in World War II). It can't do basic programming (e.g write a javascript function to reverse a string). Just goes to show that everyone besides OpenAI are so terrified of these things that they can only release versions that are toys.
Do these companies fear their customers that much? Maybe that's the difference between Microsoft/OpenAI and Facebook/Google. Microsoft sells the LLM to the customer who will be more impressed by the product if it's useful. With Facebook/Google the product uses the LLM. The LLM may make them an unsuitable product if they don't click on an ad after using it.
What makes you so sure? Microsoft already has a fully productized LLM that people pay for and has in turn provided real value to both users and the company (copilot). To assert that some other company has a better one but it's... not ready yet? is odd.
I can't think of the last time Google made a new product. New as in "not a reimplementation of what another company already productized", product as in "people pay for it". I don't think they have what it takes.
Edit: my bet is Google makes a free to play version that is ad supported, as they're want to do. The question is where do the ads go. The answer, most likely, is in the responses. So instead of reading the most likely continuation of a string, you get what the highest bidder wants the most likely continuation to be. Hooray.
You can buy flight tickets from Google, that is a relatively new product even if you buy them from the search result. So Google search is good at adding new products that are context sensitive to your query, I don't see why they couldn't make such things with a chat bot answering question queries instead of just trying to link to sites with answers.
> a chat bot answering question queries instead of just trying to link to sites with answers
And kill their golden goose? Google makes more money the longer you spend on their ad-ridden search result pages. I don't doubt they'll make a question answering bot, but the real question is how they fund it (see edit above for my guess).
A ChatGPT-like AI that's answering your question in the context of your recent search and browsing history can make a pretty darn sophisticated guess about what ads you might be primed to see.
But deploying something like that at scale not only means developing the consumer experience but also the ad placement platform that generates optimal revenue from it. It's not a thing to toss over the wall just because ChatGPT won some news cycles.
You hit the nail on the head. Google’s problem is business model, not technology. They need you to not know things so their advertisers can pay to inform you. A high quality LLM is exactly the opposite of what works for Google and their advertisers.
I think Google has three choices: 1) reorient their business model to be about making money by providing direct value to the user, 2) pivot to be about ad-supported entertainment rather than productivity/information, or 3) cut costs, run as a cash cow, throw off as much profit as possible before obselesence.
There's no rush. This space is so immature and yet so plainly ripe that there's little benefit to being first. Leapfrogging with matured market insight is where the big winners live.
OpenAI will have a secure home with Microsoft, but aren't positioned to run away with anything anytime soon. They're at least as likely to be the Altavista to Google Search, the Napster to Spotify, the MySpace to Facebook, etc
It's easy to look like you're "ahead" by constantly releasing shiny new things that aren't actually profitable.
Until OpenAI is generating billions in profit, I wouldn't be so quick to criticize the other big companies. Google in particular has a reputation[0] to defend - they're not going to risk their cash cow with a half-cocked LLM that spouts patent falsehoods half the time. Not to mention the false economics of losing money on every single search.
[0] - the reputation might be sullied amongst the HN crowd, but they're negligible when it comes to dominance of Google as a search engine for normies.
Microsoft is desperate to monetize Teams separately from the M365 license because of how expensive it is to operate. Initially they were chasing the platform app store route but that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. This is their second attempt.
To anyone fortunate to not have to use Teams, this is no joke - it's mind-bogglingly terrible. But I have noticed some unintentional humor, if I send a message like "ok, this isn't working, why don't I Slack you a Zoom link instead?" I get an immediate modal popping up, asking if I would answer two quick questions...
It’s quite literally a daily event where someone in a call will say “sorry, my teams is bugged out, I can’t see you” or some other bug of the day. A coworker keeps a log of every teams bug he sees which is enormous.
It’s not even weird edge cases. The core features like calls just flat out don’t work in random ways.
There's been a recent update that managed to break the chat screen even more than before (when it was "only" slow).
Roughly half the time I start teams, the chat window will be empty. It's just gray. It doesn't look like it's loading with empty bubbles or similar, it just sits there doing nothing and being completely empty.
I can change contacts, the heading updates, but there just are no messages showing up. I can change tabs, like going to activity, calendar, or teams (where messages do show up), when I get back to the chats, no contents.
Of course, this being Microsoft, a restart seems to fix it right up.
Yeah, but if the teams developers had been fixing those bugs, they wouldn’t have been able to build this AI-powered teams premium. /s
As a daily user of teams it’s pretty obvious that the way teams is built is not informed by UX experts or user feedback, and mostly is focused on checking off as many boxes as possible to sell the product to C-level. It has a bewildering set of features, and they’re usually either kind of broken or kind of hard to use, or both.
But I have no doubt they’re eating slack’s lunch, for the same reason my employer switched from slack to teams: convenient licensing, bundling and deployment.
Deployment in particular, in my (limited) experience. We had to deploy Slack and I was amazed that there was no way of configuring it via Group Policy or such. It had to be done manually on each machine. Madness.
Then Microsoft foisted Teams on us and we had to waste time finding ways to disable it.
In the end, I’m not sure which I hate more. Slack is also a dog-slow JavaScript app, so at least in that sense, they are one as bad as the other.
Teams is one of those things that feels like we should have solved this like 10 years ago.
Same thing with online payment systems - how is it that we didn't have that stuff completely solved like 20 years ago?
I mean I know the answer deep down but seriously - Some folks did solve it, a lot did not or don't want to. Can't keep a job on a complete software package.
No it isn't; Teams is one of those things that Linux users think is IRC because they don't understand Microsoft's offerings and why companies pay a lot of money for them.
Teams is not primarily a chat client, it's one of many front ends for Microsoft Office 365 (now M365). It's backed by SharePoint, you can share documents through Teams which are also available in Explorer through OneDrive, in the web through your Microsoft account login, on mobile through Microsoft apps, and you can edit them in the Office classic interface, in a web browser, or in the Teams interface, while other people are editing them.
Teams is backed by the Microsoft Graph which yes makes it so you can add chatbots to Teams channels, but also means you can add listeners and webhooks from events that happen in your company, e.g. when someone in Microsoft Planner makes a task it can update a Team channel, or when someone
Teams is a voice and video chat like Zoom but it's backed by the Active Directory permissions, and that means you can federate with other organisations and allow calls internal/outbound but only to linked organisations. It's tied to LinkedIn (which Microsoft own) for contact lookup and user directory seraching.
Teams is backed by Microsoft Azure features, even before this GPT announcement, for transcription and recording and upload.
Teams integrates with Office so that when your status changes, that shows up in Outlook for people trying to email you, or in Outlook you can make a 'new Teams meeting' from the same interface as making any other meeting, and Teams meetings show up on your calendar, but it's a calendar in M365 not on your desktop so you can go the other way and see your calendar in the Teams interface and join Teams calls from there.
From inside Teams' client, as well as searching chat history, the search finds people in your organisation and shows you organisation structure, who reports to whom.
Teams has a plugin architecture / app store inside it, for adding things like Wikipedia search.
Teams is scriptable through the same Azure / Graph API as all the other Microsoft Cloud systems, and manageable through the same web interface, with the ability to set permissions on which admin teams can enable/disable which Teams features.
And all of this has the UX that a company of non-tech people are used to - Microsoft Office, Windows - and that a large company with Microsoft offerings is already managing through web management.
Nobody is hooking Zoom up so that someone editing a spreadsheet in Excel on their desktop and someone editing a spreadsheet in Zoom chat are both collaboratively editing the same file at the same time live. Nobody is hooking IRC up so you can see sharepoint libraries in it. Is anybody hooking Slack up to be an app store that connects into your existing Microsoft ecosystem so departments can build workflows from PowerBI over SharePoint documents to Slack? So that the Microsoft Bing search that you get by default in Edge logged in with your company Microsoft account also searches your Slack chat history and surfaces results in the same window as the web results and search results for all other company documents you have permission to access?
Microsoft is building / has built the walled garden lockin of the next decade or more, and it's compelling despite parts of it being sub-par or having poor UX, because the user is the organization not the individual, and the benefit is more than the sum of its parts. The MS Office lockin is history, OpenOffice isn't even playing the same game.
Meetings summaries are cool I guess, but it's about the least interesting thing you could do with gpt and Microsoft's software suite. And at $10/user/month?
Put it in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, GitHub, generate Excel formulas, let me design power automate flows, or power query m stuff for powerbi, let me datamine the company SharePoint/OneDrive.
With more than 400 new features and improvements added to Microsoft Teams last year
Unfortunately, the only things I've seen are trivial and IMHO entirely unnecessary changes like "change the icons" or "add more useless whitespace", or something that was already widespread and possible decades ago like "now we have multiple windows". If that's what they thought were "features and improvements", it explains why Teams is still a sluggish pig that just barely works and feels repugnant to interact with.
It still greatly disappoints me that Microsoft of all companies can't write a decent native IM/AV client anymore. This AI stuff is not going to improve the basic experience either.
The latest Teams update lost the ability to paste from a Teams chat message into plain text (e.g. Visual Studio Code). All the line breaks disappear.
The only way around this is to have a random Microsoft Word window, paste the Teams message into Word, and then copy from Word into Visual Studio Code.
Aaargh Microsoft! A mindbogglingly dumb regression for a 5 year old product.
168 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadThere is some ML functionality built into Visual Studio now a days (intellisense + some auto complete). But I don't think they market it as a separate product.
There are some startups working on these solutions too right?
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Feels like Amazon took some inspiration from that.
The situation that is described in Manna is merely something that would occur under complete free market capitalism, and assumes that people would not change or adapt to meet the challenges of automation.
How is that different than a co-worker/manager/HR?
Or even better... moderate people by cutting off their mic: "Please stay on topic", "Don't interrupt others", "Don't ignore other participants", "Please answer the question", etc.
An AI meeting moderator would make work so much better.
The status quo is a joke. The threshold for considering behavior toxic is too high.
Now we have the technology to end the bullshit.
If you are interrupting, ignoring others, bluffing, lying, manipulating, gaslighting, being a sycophant, playing dirty... you are no longer playing the game. There are ways of achieving things that do not involve cheating.
If you disagree, then I have to ask you: are you really being collaborative and inclusive, working for a common goal, or you are simply being selectively inclusive and collaborative up to the point it's time to sabotage others?
There are people out there that get ahead by being irrational, selfish and overall horrible. Let's get them out of the way and let the best ideas win.
Primitive animals are less social, less collaborative and cannot collaborate in large groups. There are vestigial behaviors from them that arise once in a while in humans. It's time to evolve and press the mute button on lower ape behavior. Humans cannot do it reliably.
Automatically detecting and flagging selfish individuals that cannot work in groups and actively sabotage their group by preventing the best ideas from prevailing is something worth trying.
The reason everyone is seeing therapists is because some people are determined to ruin the work experience for others. We can do better.
Same thing on muting mic or doing any kind of auto moderation.
That’s going very far on an imperfect technology. I’d sooner bet on autonomous driving than people using such a moderator.
We already employ profanity filters in multiplayer games. We also have rating systems in games that allow peers to flag toxic behavior after a game session for review. These have helped limiting the harm caused by toxic players.
Those are simple low tech solutions that could be added to videoconferencing applications.
Did someone act toxic during a meeting? Allow participants to report a toxic interaction, with an AI generated transcript + recording.
Then you can go one step further and build the future of HR playbook enforcement:
"Meeting participant #1234, you are engaging in toxic behavior and are in direct violation of the HR playbook page 113 section 9: please stop disrupting the meeting and shut the hell up to avoid disciplinary action. You have 10 seconds to comply. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...". /s
But jokes aside... Today we have great sentiment analysis capabilities. There is a subset of the English language you should never use at work. We can also detect if someone is yelling. We can flag highly offensive terms. There are ways in which we can apply technology in a sensible way to improve the work experience, to limit the harm caused by the worst types of behaviors including but not limited to violence.
We can also use technology to hold HR accountable to enforce the HR playbook.
But today? Wew
A reputation system with user submitted information can also help.
Then you would think 1000 times before saying anything that can get you marked for termination.
So far I've been lucky that nothing surprising has been leaked to others or wound up in recordings, but this didn't used to happen.
I'd be happy if they improved the responsiveness. Say to the level of MSN Messenger 20 years ago, even though I'm running 2022 hardware.
I understand the online versions lack some features, but for my use-case they are great.
The idea is to have a backend [2], powered by a library [3] that does the heavy lifting and a / multiple frontends to be used with that (e.g: CLI[4], Web frontend[5], Flutter app[6]).
We're looking for contributors! If you hate Teams and want to improve an Open Source version, PRs are welcome (:
[1]: https://github.com/fossteams
[2]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-backend
[3]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-api
[4]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli
[5]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams-frontend
[6]: https://github.com/fossteams/fossteams_gui
I used to work in a big corporate, suddenly all teams has to change to MS team even the current software works just fine. I just decided to quit.
Don't get me wrong, the Teams servers aren't the fastest out there - but processing a 50 MB JSON with Javascript (well, Angular) is probably not needed at all if your goal is just to see a chat message. We do that heavy lifting on the server side (that anyways runs locally on your PC), so that the client can get the messages without all of the mess.
> It seems to me that you are saying Microsoft should not be allowed to release their own version of Slack and Zoom for free.
That is exactly what I'm saying, because it is against EU competition law as Microsoft has a dominant position in the market -- the "plain English" guide to competition law simply states: [1]
Microsoft does arguably all of these with different products to some level. Zoom, Slack, Discord etc are all paid-for products with a cost that, prior to February 2020, companies paid for separately. Microsoft then came along with Teams and released it as part of a certain tier of M365 subscription for free. Whilst Zoom and friends have not been driven out of the market, they have suffered as a result of it and what was a burgeoning industry, including with "freemium" or "paid support" FOSS models like Jitsi, have suffered as the corporate behemoths of the world use Teams. The real proof of the pudding is the fact that most users hate Teams: it's widely regarded as being not as good as its competitors and yet is massively used. Why? Monopolistic business practices.[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/selling-in-eu/competit...
I understand where you (and the law) are coming from, but when it comes to software it is hard to say what are "unrealistically low prices". Slack and Zoom also have free tiers, so how is it unrealistic for Microsoft to offer that as well? Looking at Google for example, would you say that they should be forced to charge for their services to reflect their costs? I doubt that either of these would be a good thing.
So is it free or not? If it's part of a subscription, it's just included in the cost. The subscription already included a whole suite of different software, what makes Teams special in that regard? Who decides that Teams is a separate product and not just a feature of the O365 product?
I have built an alternative Teams client for smart glasses using only MS Graph and Azure Communication Services and it can already do most interactions related to chat/meetings/org etc.
This gives you a way to run an alternative client in corporations where you don't have the possibility to use third party apps. On top of that, since it's not using the Graph API, we might get better features that will take long time to be available in the Graph API.
Even if they try to stop you guys, they probably won't be able to pull it off unless they can manage it in court
For a new feature the hobby team can just hack away for a few nights, push the release and they are done.
The engineering org needs to plan and coordinate the feature across multiple teams (web app, desktop app, mobile app, Graph, teams admin panel, o365 admin panel,...) and then make sure it fits well into the rest of the MS infrastructure (policies, permission scopes, IT admin controls, licensing, auditing,...). Legal might need to be involved.
And then after aligning all those teams and waiting for each team to prioritize and do the work it needs to get into the MS roadmap as well going through the usual stages (private preview, public preview, General Availability). And once it hits GA it needs to be supported for many years.
If they still send a cease and desist letter, we'll probably comply and make sure the code is archived somewhere for people to continue / use the project (:
TL;DR: I would consider a cease and desist a success, and hope that Microsoft reuses the code
[1]: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli/issues/2
[1]https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1620533783702433792
https://blenderbot.ai/
Example question: What’s a covariance matrix?
BlenderBot: Principal component analysis is a popular technique for analyzing large datasets containing a high number of dimensions/features per observation, increasing the interpretability of data while preserving the maximum amount of information, and enabling the visualization of multidimensional data.
ChatGPT: A covariance matrix is a symmetric matrix that describes the covariance between multiple variables in a given dataset. The diagonal elements of the matrix represent the variance of each variable, and the off-diagonal elements represent the covariance between each pair of variables. The covariance matrix is used in multivariate statistics to understand the relationships between different variables and to perform statistical inference and hypothesis testing.
Do these companies fear their customers that much? Maybe that's the difference between Microsoft/OpenAI and Facebook/Google. Microsoft sells the LLM to the customer who will be more impressed by the product if it's useful. With Facebook/Google the product uses the LLM. The LLM may make them an unsuitable product if they don't click on an ad after using it.
What makes you so sure? Microsoft already has a fully productized LLM that people pay for and has in turn provided real value to both users and the company (copilot). To assert that some other company has a better one but it's... not ready yet? is odd.
I can't think of the last time Google made a new product. New as in "not a reimplementation of what another company already productized", product as in "people pay for it". I don't think they have what it takes.
Edit: my bet is Google makes a free to play version that is ad supported, as they're want to do. The question is where do the ads go. The answer, most likely, is in the responses. So instead of reading the most likely continuation of a string, you get what the highest bidder wants the most likely continuation to be. Hooray.
And kill their golden goose? Google makes more money the longer you spend on their ad-ridden search result pages. I don't doubt they'll make a question answering bot, but the real question is how they fund it (see edit above for my guess).
So why not keep people there by having an engaging chat bot? Could even refresh and add new context sensitive ads every time you ask something new.
But deploying something like that at scale not only means developing the consumer experience but also the ad placement platform that generates optimal revenue from it. It's not a thing to toss over the wall just because ChatGPT won some news cycles.
Chat bots also can very naturally embed advertisement:
btw, I think you would really love to check this related product which according to many reviews can help with the problem you just asked me about.
Someone will kill their golden goose sooner or later. It's better if they kill it themselves and silently replace it with something else.
Although clicking on them might not be quite as natural as clicking as part of search results, so still massive damage to the golden goose.
I think Google has three choices: 1) reorient their business model to be about making money by providing direct value to the user, 2) pivot to be about ad-supported entertainment rather than productivity/information, or 3) cut costs, run as a cash cow, throw off as much profit as possible before obselesence.
OpenAI will have a secure home with Microsoft, but aren't positioned to run away with anything anytime soon. They're at least as likely to be the Altavista to Google Search, the Napster to Spotify, the MySpace to Facebook, etc
Until OpenAI is generating billions in profit, I wouldn't be so quick to criticize the other big companies. Google in particular has a reputation[0] to defend - they're not going to risk their cash cow with a half-cocked LLM that spouts patent falsehoods half the time. Not to mention the false economics of losing money on every single search.
[0] - the reputation might be sullied amongst the HN crowd, but they're negligible when it comes to dominance of Google as a search engine for normies.
They are trying it, here:
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-s...
Demo:
https://opt.alpa.ai/
But it's clearly not as good as GPT3.5
It’s not even weird edge cases. The core features like calls just flat out don’t work in random ways.
There's been a recent update that managed to break the chat screen even more than before (when it was "only" slow).
Roughly half the time I start teams, the chat window will be empty. It's just gray. It doesn't look like it's loading with empty bubbles or similar, it just sits there doing nothing and being completely empty.
I can change contacts, the heading updates, but there just are no messages showing up. I can change tabs, like going to activity, calendar, or teams (where messages do show up), when I get back to the chats, no contents.
Of course, this being Microsoft, a restart seems to fix it right up.
As a daily user of teams it’s pretty obvious that the way teams is built is not informed by UX experts or user feedback, and mostly is focused on checking off as many boxes as possible to sell the product to C-level. It has a bewildering set of features, and they’re usually either kind of broken or kind of hard to use, or both.
But I have no doubt they’re eating slack’s lunch, for the same reason my employer switched from slack to teams: convenient licensing, bundling and deployment.
Then Microsoft foisted Teams on us and we had to waste time finding ways to disable it.
In the end, I’m not sure which I hate more. Slack is also a dog-slow JavaScript app, so at least in that sense, they are one as bad as the other.
Same thing with online payment systems - how is it that we didn't have that stuff completely solved like 20 years ago?
I mean I know the answer deep down but seriously - Some folks did solve it, a lot did not or don't want to. Can't keep a job on a complete software package.
Teams is not primarily a chat client, it's one of many front ends for Microsoft Office 365 (now M365). It's backed by SharePoint, you can share documents through Teams which are also available in Explorer through OneDrive, in the web through your Microsoft account login, on mobile through Microsoft apps, and you can edit them in the Office classic interface, in a web browser, or in the Teams interface, while other people are editing them.
Teams is backed by the Microsoft Graph which yes makes it so you can add chatbots to Teams channels, but also means you can add listeners and webhooks from events that happen in your company, e.g. when someone in Microsoft Planner makes a task it can update a Team channel, or when someone
Teams is a voice and video chat like Zoom but it's backed by the Active Directory permissions, and that means you can federate with other organisations and allow calls internal/outbound but only to linked organisations. It's tied to LinkedIn (which Microsoft own) for contact lookup and user directory seraching.
Teams is backed by Microsoft Azure features, even before this GPT announcement, for transcription and recording and upload.
Teams integrates with Office so that when your status changes, that shows up in Outlook for people trying to email you, or in Outlook you can make a 'new Teams meeting' from the same interface as making any other meeting, and Teams meetings show up on your calendar, but it's a calendar in M365 not on your desktop so you can go the other way and see your calendar in the Teams interface and join Teams calls from there.
From inside Teams' client, as well as searching chat history, the search finds people in your organisation and shows you organisation structure, who reports to whom.
Teams has a plugin architecture / app store inside it, for adding things like Wikipedia search.
Teams is scriptable through the same Azure / Graph API as all the other Microsoft Cloud systems, and manageable through the same web interface, with the ability to set permissions on which admin teams can enable/disable which Teams features.
And all of this has the UX that a company of non-tech people are used to - Microsoft Office, Windows - and that a large company with Microsoft offerings is already managing through web management.
Nobody is hooking Zoom up so that someone editing a spreadsheet in Excel on their desktop and someone editing a spreadsheet in Zoom chat are both collaboratively editing the same file at the same time live. Nobody is hooking IRC up so you can see sharepoint libraries in it. Is anybody hooking Slack up to be an app store that connects into your existing Microsoft ecosystem so departments can build workflows from PowerBI over SharePoint documents to Slack? So that the Microsoft Bing search that you get by default in Edge logged in with your company Microsoft account also searches your Slack chat history and surfaces results in the same window as the web results and search results for all other company documents you have permission to access?
Microsoft is building / has built the walled garden lockin of the next decade or more, and it's compelling despite parts of it being sub-par or having poor UX, because the user is the organization not the individual, and the benefit is more than the sum of its parts. The MS Office lockin is history, OpenOffice isn't even playing the same game.
Put it in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, GitHub, generate Excel formulas, let me design power automate flows, or power query m stuff for powerbi, let me datamine the company SharePoint/OneDrive.
Unfortunately, the only things I've seen are trivial and IMHO entirely unnecessary changes like "change the icons" or "add more useless whitespace", or something that was already widespread and possible decades ago like "now we have multiple windows". If that's what they thought were "features and improvements", it explains why Teams is still a sluggish pig that just barely works and feels repugnant to interact with.
It still greatly disappoints me that Microsoft of all companies can't write a decent native IM/AV client anymore. This AI stuff is not going to improve the basic experience either.
The only way around this is to have a random Microsoft Word window, paste the Teams message into Word, and then copy from Word into Visual Studio Code.
Aaargh Microsoft! A mindbogglingly dumb regression for a 5 year old product.
Notepad is better and starts faster. At least the Win10 version.