Microsoft announces spades of incoming Office 365 additions

Microsoft’s OneDrive will soon be smart enough to transcribe your video and audio files using AI.

In a statement this week, the company noted that the service will support more than 320 different video and audio file types.

This is largely or organisations that share files constantly across its Microsoft 365 suite — the online version of Microsoft Office.

“While viewing a video or listening to an audio file, a full transcript (improving both accessibility and search) will show directly in our industry-leading viewer,” the company adds, hinting that a transcript will appear automatically with timestamps alongside the video or audio playing.

“Once you’re ready to make a video broadly available across the organization, you can upload and publish to Microsoft Stream,” the company adds.

Notably, transcriptions aren’t the only advancement heading to OneDrive. The AI-powered file service will also support in-video face detection and automatic captions soon.

Further advancements are set to arrive for Microsoft 365 subscribers this year too, including:

• Intelligent image search that also draws context and text from within images, like till receipts.
• Intelligent file recommendations, which will personalise the files available on your 365 dashboard to better suit your work habits, or co-worker connections.
• File insights, which provides analytics on the number of views for documents, viewer information and summaries.
• Intelligent sharing, which suggests you share files with attendees of a meeting once said meeting is over. This is also tied to the events on the Outlook Calendar.

Microsoft’s also promising a few quality of life improvements, and the ability to restore files on OneDrive.

Many of these tweaks will be available before the end of the year.

Feature image: Microsoft