Microsoft Brings New Phone Features to Teams

Microsoft Teams is getting several new phone-related features for Microsoft 365 commercial customers, which the firm says builds towards its vision for the future of calling.

“One-to-one calls are a critical way to get work done [and] nearly 80 million users in over 180 countries rely on Microsoft Teams Phone to make calls richer and more collaborative,” Microsoft general manager Nicole Herskowitz writes. “The path for Teams Phone is clearly [to] prioritize the most critical public switched telephone network (PSTN) needs while developing modern calling experiences.”

According to Microsoft, this transition to modern calling experiences will include using a familiar tool, Teams, rather than having an old-fashioned siloed calling experience; using voice-over-IP (VoIP) for calls between organizations, and having more flexible calling solutions for hybrid workers, many of whom use multiple different devices throughout the day.

And with all that in mind, it is announcing many new Teams features related to phone calls. Some of the key additions include:

Transfer calls between devices. Teams now lets you transfer calls between different endpoints without interrupting the call. You do so from the device you’d like to move the call to.

Spam call identification. Also available now, this feature identifies likely spam calls so you can easily decline them. (Teams also digitally attests outgoing calls so your calls won’t be identified as spam.)

Apple CarPlay support. You can now join calls and meetings using your vehicle’s built-in controls or hands-free using Siri.

Call transcription and recording. Soon, you will be able to record phone calls and capture transcriptions of those calls.

There are several other new features, so check out the original post if you want to learn more. You can also learn more about Teams Phones from the Microsoft website.