Microsoft Teams gets chat balloons, paging support on Windows 10, macOS

When Microsoft Teams was originally announced, it was positioned as a workplace collaboration tool to compete with platforms like Slack. Today, Microsoft Teams has evolved into a place where you can communicate like on Discord, WhatsApp, and the company hopes the platform can be optimized for consumers as well.

In the latest effort to improve Teams’ chat experience, Microsoft is introducing a new feature called “chat bubbles” – a feature that will be familiar to Messenger or WhatsApp users.

When you receive a new message on your mobile, a chat balloon (a floating notification alert) appears on the screen and it stays informed of everything else you do on the screen for a few seconds. Microsoft is trying to recreate that experience on Windows 10 and macOS by enabling support for new chat bubbles in Teams.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Microsoft Teams chat bubbles appear on the main screen of a meeting and attendees will easily follow the chat. Currently, users need to open the chat window on the right side of the app and scroll through the conversation history to find the last message.

Chat bubbles allow chats to appear on the screens of all meeting participants and allow users to join the discussion without having to switch to the current chat screen. This feature makes “chatting more central to the conversation,” Microsoft said.

Of course, you can always turn off the bubbles if you don’t like the idea.

The chat bubble feature will be rolled out in mid-July and would be available to everyone by the end of the month.

Paging on large gallery in Microsoft Teams

In Microsoft Teams’ large gallery mode, you can currently have up to 49 videos on the screen. To help users watch up to 98 videos on the screen, Microsoft is introducing paging support in Teams.

In the current Large Gallery view, when you have more than 49 videos, you will soon be able to use the “paging” feature, i.e. navigation buttons to watch other participants’ video.

The navigation buttons appear under the large gallery, and users can click the buttons to watch or connect with more video participants.

This feature will also be rolled out to users in the coming weeks. If you can’t wait, you can always subscribe to the Microsoft Teams preview program and start testing the experimental improvements.

In addition to these quality improvements, Microsoft Teams also seems to be getting support for new presenter modes, including reporter mode, improved large gallery on mobile, and more.

Source: windowslatest