Microsoft unveils premium messaging powered by ChatGPT

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new premium messaging service that will be powered by Open AI’s ChatGPT messaging service. 

In a blog post, Microsoft Teams vice president Nicole Herskowitz wrote that its new service,  Teams Premium will use the latest technologies in an effort to “make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected — whether it’s one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars.”  

The company also said that ChatGPT will generate meeting notes and recommend tasks and action items, and help users create templates so their meetings can “adhere to company best practices and policies.” 

“As we face economic uncertainties and changes to work patterns, organizations are searching for ways to optimize IT investments and re-energize employees to achieve business results,” Herskowitz wrote in her blog post. “Now—more than ever—organizations need solutions to adapt to change, improve productivity, and reduce costs. Fortunately, modern tools powered by AI hold the promise to boost individual, team, and organizational-level productivity and fundamentally change how we work.” 

“This promise is rapidly becoming a reality,” Herskowitz added. “At Microsoft, we’re working to incorporate new, AI-powered capabilities across our consumer and enterprise products, including Microsoft Teams.”

The announcement comes after Microsoft announced last month that it will invest billions of dollars in OpenAI in part of a third phase of a partnership between the two companies. 

The latest investment follows previous ones both tech companies made in 2019 and 2021 and extends the partnership across the two companies as ChatGPT has become a widely popular tool. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a free tool that launched in November, automatically generates human-like responses to users’ queries in a way that is more advanced than previous technology. The new innovative technology has raised concerns among many parents and educators recently, with some saying that students may have used ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, resulting in school districts like New York City and Seattle banning the tool. 

In response to the controversy, OpenAI shared that it will create a new tool, referred to as the classifier, that will tell the difference between text generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and text written by a human.