How Microsoft Teams will use AI to filter out typing, barking, and other noise from video calls

Last month, Microsoft announced that Teams, its competitor to Slack, Facebook's Workplace, and Google's Hangouts Chat, had passed 44 million daily active users. The milestone overshadowed its unveiling of a few new features coming "later this year." Most were straightforward: a hand-raising feature to indicate you have something to say, offline and low-bandwidth support to read chat messages and write responses even if you have poor or no internet connection, and an option to pop chats out into a separate window. But one feature, real-time noise suppression, stood out -- Microsoft demoed how the AI minimized distracting background noise during a call. How many times have you asked someone to mute themselves or to relocate from a noisy area? Real-time noise suppression will filter out someone typing on their keyboard while in a meeting, the rustling of a bag of chips (as you can see in the video above), and a vacuum cleaner running in the background.