Microsoft is working on a welcome change for meetings in Teams

Microsoft has seemingly been laser-focused on Teams development recently. The company has revealed a handy integration with Outlook, AI-powered file-sharing, Multi-Question polls, and a Teams Rooms for Android update. Now, it seems that another feature is in the works for the popular communication and collaboration software.

If you have participated in large interactive meetings and presentation on Teams where everyone is actively collaborating, you might have observed an etiquette where a person uses the hand-raising feature in Teams in order to ask for permission to speak. This enables the presenter to pause what they are saying at a suitable time and then let the person who raised their (digital) hand voice their thoughts.

While this capability works fine in essence, a minor nuisance - especially in large interactive meetings - can be where a participant forgets to lower their hand after they have spoken. This can lead to some confusion as to whether the person has raised their hand again for follow-up questions.

Microsoft is working on a solution to this problem. In an update on its Microsoft 365 Roadmap, the Redmond tech giant has mentioned that Teams will take action to automatically lower a person's hand after they have spoken. Basically, Teams will detect when a person has spoken and then prompt them to lower their hand. If the person doesn't respond to the prompt, their hand will be automatically lowered.

Microsoft has not yet defined how long this prompt will wait for a response from a participant but those details will likely be ironed out later since the feature is tentatively planned for general release in March 2023, which is a few months away. The capability is being tracked under the Feature ID 90022 and is in development only for Mac and desktop for now.

Microsoft is working on a welcome change for meetings in Teams