Copilot in Outlook: Meeting Preparation Is About to Get Smarter

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Currently, the “Prepare for meetings with Copilot” feature requires at least three participants. Starting mid-October, this is changing. Copilot will soon support all meetings, including 1:1s. The rollout will begin in mid-October and is expected to complete by November 2025 according to the message center. With this update, you’ll also see new real-time insights in the Outlook meeting event form, summarizing relevant context, tasks, documents, and other resources. Plus, you’ll be able to chat with Copilot to confirm action items or better understand meeting goals. The more context Copilot has, the better it works. Meeting series with related emails, shared documents, Teams chats, and previous Copilot transcriptions deliver the richest experience. If your organization limits Copilot to in-meeting use only and deletes content afterward, you’ll miss out on much of this value. Here is a relevant " how to " guide for users.

Create avatars from picture or photo is live

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Avatars in Teams is a way to express your presence without turning your camera on in meetings, and it is used when entering a Mesh meeting place. I must admit I du prefer the use of real video, but I do understand the user scenarios where an avatar might come in handy. 

Depending on your preferences, the avatar can be created to your liking, and there are many options to choose from when it comes to skin color, body type, face frame, colors and more. Sometimes, I think there are always too many options, and I never get a result that actually looks like me (if that was my intent).

The avatar feature has been around for a while, but I am obviously not the only one thinking my avatar could and should look more like me. Microsoft has now released a feature that allows you to create an avatar directly from an image (taken when you create the avatar) or by uploading an existing photo. 

The feature seems to be available for most Teams SKU's (Business and E3/E5, even essentials) at this time, and available for both MAC and Windows as long as you are using new Teams client (2.1). You still need 6GB of RAM and a Dual-core processor in order for avatars to be working, 8GB and Quad-core is still recommended for optimal performance. 

I had to give it a test run before writing this post, and the result wasn't that far off the real me. Here is the full user guide, if you want to give it a try: Join a meeting as an avatar.