Microsoft

Microsoft Teams gains animated avatars and AI-powered recaps • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, Microsoft, Microsoft Ignite 2022, Microsoft Teams, StartupsNo Comments

At its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced updates heading to Teams, its ever-evolving videoconferencing and workplace collaboration app. New avatars are available, and more details were announced around Teams Premium, a paid set of Teams features including AI-generated tasks and meeting guides, which is set to arrive in December in preview. Teams Premium is an effort to simplify Teams pricing, which before was disparate across several tiers. Microsoft says it expects it to cost $10 per user per month, with official pricing to come once Teams Premium is generally available. That’s higher than the lowest-cost Google Workspace plan, which costs $6 per user per month, but less expensive than Zoom Pro ($15 per user per month). The aforementioned avatars — a part of Microsoft’s Mesh platform — allow users to choose customized, animated versions of themselves to show up in Teams meetings, a bit like Zoom’s virtual avatars. Through the Avatars app in the Microsoft Teams app store, users can design up to three avatars to use in a Teams meeting with gestures to react to topics. Microsoft’s CVP of modern work Jared Spataro pitches avatars as a way to “take a break from the camera” but “still have a physical presence” in Teams meetings. “Our data shows that 51% of Gen Z envisions working in the metaverse in the next two years,” he wrote in a blog post — a percentage that seems optimistically high if we’re talking about VR and AR headsets, but depends on how one defines “metaverse.” He continued: “You can create custom avatars to represent yourself.” Avatars are perhaps also a small play — albeit an unspoken one — at revitalizing a platform that’s stagnated over the past year. Microsoft says that “more than 270 million” people actively use Teams monthly today, a number that hasn’t budged since January as workers increasingly return to the office. Avatars are available in the standard Teams for private preview customers, while organizations interested in trying them out can sign up for updates on the Teams website if they’re not already part of the Teams Technical Access Program, Microsoft says. Teams Premium On the Teams Premium side, customers are getting meeting guides designed to help them pick the right “meeting experience” — e.g. a client call, brainstorm meeting or help desk support — with options that can be customized and managed by an IT team. Teams Premium users will also be able to brand the meeting experience with bespoke logos for the lobby and brand-specific backgrounds at the organization level. The forthcoming Intelligent Recap feature in Microsoft Teams Premium, powered by machine learning. Image Credits: Microsoft Among the more interesting new Teams Premium-specific additions leverage AI. For example, there’s Intelligent Recap, which attempts to capture highlights from Teams meetings, and an Intelligent Playback feature that automatically generates chapters for Teams meeting recordings. Personalized Insights highlights key moments in recordings, like when a person’s name was mentioned, while Intelligent Search aims to make searching transcripts easier with suggested speakers. Beyond all this, Teams Premium will deliver real-time translations for 40 spoken languages and the above-mentioned AI-generated tasks, which are automatically assigned to meeting attendees. AI aside, Teams Premium will soon offer what Microsoft’s calling Advanced Meeting Protection, a set of features to safeguard confidential meetings such as board meetings and undisclosed product launches. These span watermarking, limits to recording and sensitivity labels to automatically apply protections to meetings. Relatedly, new Advanced Webinars in Teams Premium provide options for a registration waitlist and manual approvals, automated reminder emails, a virtual green room for hosts and presenters and the ability to manage what attendees see. Teams Premium will also introduce advanced virtual appointments, which are designed to help manage the end-to-end appointment experience for direct-to-consumer brands with pre-appointment text reminders, a branded lobby and post-appointment follow-ups. Organizations get both scheduled and on-demand appointments, a simplified view of all virtual appointments and pre-appointment chat capabilities to communicate with their customers. On the backend, customers can view analytics like usage trends, a history of virtual appointments and no-shows and wait times with specific staff and departments. Microsoft says that Teams Premium features will begin rolling out in December 2022 as part of a preview, with general availability coming in February 2023. The AI capabilities, including Intelligent Playback and Intelligence Recap, will hit the first half of 2023.

Thanks to AI, you can now create automations in Power Automate by simply describing them • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Automation, Enterprise, Microsoft, Microsoft Ignite 2022, openai codex, power platform, Robotics & AINo Comments

Power Automate, Microsoft’s Power Platform service that helps users create workflows between apps, is getting new AI smarts. During its Ignite conference, Microsoft rolled out capabilities powered by OpenAI’s Codex, the code-generating machine learning system underpinning GitHub Copilot. Starting today (in public preview), Power Automate users can write what they want to automate in natural language and have Codex generate suggestions to jumpstart the flow creation. It’s Microsoft’s latest move to more tightly integrate the various technologies from OpenAI, the San Francisco AI startup in which it has invested $1 billion, into its family of products. Two years ago, Microsoft introduced a Power Apps feature that used GPT-3, OpenAI’s text-generating system, to create formulas in Power Fx, Power Platform’s programming language. Microsoft also continues to evolve Azure OpenAI Service, a fully managed, enterprise-focused platform designed to give businesses access to OpenAI innovations with governance features. “Our goal is that anywhere in the ecosystem that a person would need to write code they have the flexibility to start with natural language too, and Codex is core to that strategy,” Stephen Siciliano, VP of Power Automate, told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “[These are] new tools that will help users eliminate tedious work and free up time for workers to focus on more high value projects.” Image Credits: Microsoft Using the new Codex-powered tool, Power Automate users can describe the type of workflow automation they’d like to create in a sentence. Codex will then translate this into flow recommendations, which — when set up with the appropriate connectors — can be fine-tuned within Power Automate’s flow designer to create an automated workflow. Siciliano says that the feature will support “key” Microsoft 365 connectors at launch, and that there will be additional integrations in the coming months. “We have fine-tuned Codex primarily with the thousands of templates that we have for Power Automate cloud flows today,” he added. Originally, Codex was trained on billions of lines of public code in languages like Python and JavaScript to suggest new lines of code and functions given a few snippets of existing code. “These templates are a combination of Microsoft-built and community submitted scenarios, so they cover a breadth of use cases and everything from very simple to more advanced flows.” When asked about the longer-term roadmap, Siciliano declined to reveal much. But he suggested that Codex might come to more places within Power Platform in the future. “[T]here are many different places in the Power Platform where natural language may be useful, so you’ll see a broader rollout,” he continued. “Moreover, we will continue to enhance the accuracy of the [system] over time as well.” The new Codex-Power Automate integration dovetails with enhancements to AI Builder, which also landed this morning. (AI Builder, a built-in Power Automate feature, lets users add AI capabilities and models to automated flows.) AI Builder now offers users the ability to train AI systems on the data they might want to extract from documents, allowing Power Automate to pull data in freeform documents such as contracts, statements of work and letters, even from tables that span several pages. Microsoft says the document-processing capabilities of AI Builder now support 164 languages, including handwritten Japanese.

Microsoft announces Syntex, a set of automated document and data processing services • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in AI, artificial intelligence, Automation, Microsoft, Microsoft Ignite 2022, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

Two years ago, Microsoft debuted SharePoint Syntex, which leverages AI to automate the capture and classification of data from documents — building on SharePoint’s existing services. Today marks the expansion of the platform into Microsoft Syntex, a set of new products and capabilities including file annotation and data extraction. Syntex reads, tags and indexes document content — whether digital or physical — making it searchable and available within Microsoft 365 apps and helping manage the content lifecycle with security and retention settings. According to Chris McNulty, the director of Microsoft Syntex, driving the launch was customers’ increasing desire to “do more with less,” particularly as a recession looms. A 2021 survey from Dimensional Research found that more than two-thirds of companies leave valuable data untapped, largely because of problems building pipelines to access that data. “Just as business intelligence transformed the way companies use data to drive business decisions, Microsoft Syntex unlocks the value of the massive amount of content that resides within an organization,” McNulty told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Virtually any industry with large scale content and processes will see benefits from adopting Microsoft Syntex. In particular, we see the greatest alignment with industries that work with a higher volume of technically dense and regulated content – financial services, manufacturing, health care, life sciences, and retail among them.” Syntex offers backup, arc1hiving, analytics and management tools for documents as well as a viewer to add annotations and redactions to files. Containers enable developers to store content in a managed sandbox, while “scenario accelerators” provide workflows for use cases like contract management, accounts payable and so on. “The Syntex content processor lets you build simple rules to trigger the next action, whether it’s a transaction, an alert, a workflow or just filing your content in the right libraries and folders,” McNulty explained. “[Meanwhile,] the advanced viewer adds an annotation and inking layer on top of any content viewable in Microsoft 365. Annotations can be made securely, with different permissions than the underlying content, and also without modifying the underlying content.” McNulty says that customers like TaylorMade are exploring ways to use Syntex for contract management and assembly, standardizing contracts with common clauses around financial terms. The company is also piloting the service to process orders, receipts and other transactional documents for accounts payable and finance teams, in addition to organizing and securing emails, attachments and other documents for intellectual property and patent filings. “One of the fastest-growing content transactions is e-signature,” McNulty said. “[With Syntex, you] can send electronic signature requests using Syntex, Adobe Acrobat Sign, DocuSign or any of our other e-signature partner solutions and your content stays in Microsoft 365 while it’s being reviewed and signed.” Intelligent document processing of the type Syntex does is often touted as a solution to the problem of file management and orchestration at scale. According to one source, 15% of a company’s revenue is spent creating, managing and distributing documents. Documents aren’t just costly — they’re time-wasting and error-prone. More than nine in 10 employees responding to a 2021 ABBY survey said that they waste up to eight hours each week looking through documents to find data, and using traditional methods to create a new document takes on average three hours and incurs six errors in punctuation, spellings, omissions or printing. A number of startups offer products to tackle this, including Hypatos, which applies deep learning to power a wide range of back-office automation with a focus on industries with heavy financial document processing needs. Flatfile automatically learns how imported data from files should be structured and cleaned, while another vendor, Klarity, aims to replace humans for tasks that require large-scale document review, including accounting order forms, purchase orders and agreements. As with many of its services announced today, Microsoft, evidently, is betting scale will work in its favor. “Syntex uses AI and automation technologies from across Microsoft, including summarization, translation and optical character recognition,” McNulty said. “Many of these services are being made available to Microsoft 365 commercial accounts with no additional upfront licensing under a new pay-as-you-go business model.” Syntex is beginning to roll out today and will continue to roll out in early 2023. Microsoft says it’ll have additional details on service pricing and packaging published on the Microsoft 365 message center and through licensing disclosure documentation in the coming months.

Microsoft expands Azure OpenAI Service with DALL-E 2 in preview • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in dall-e 2, Enterprise, Microsoft, Robotics & AINo Comments

When Azure OpenAI Service launched in 2021, the service — a part of Azure Cognitive Services — provided enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI’s API through the Azure platform for applications like language translation and text autocompletion. That’s not changing. But after expanding the service in May with fine-tuning features, Microsoft is today introducing invite-only access to DALL-E 2 for select Azure OpenAI Service customers. Customers can use DALL-E 2 to generate custom images using either text or images. In line with the consumer DALL-E 2 service, they can leverage inpainting and outpainting — capabilities that generate new content within a portion of an image or push an image beyond its original confines, respectively — in addition to a feature that generates variations on an existing image. Content for podcasts custom-generated by DALL-E 2, through the Azure OpenAI Service. Image Credits: Microsoft Early adopters include brands like Mattel, which used DALL-E 2 to come up with ideas for a new Hot Wheels model car. German media conglomerate RTL Deutschland, another pilot customer, is considering combining streaming content metadata with DALL-E 2 to generate visuals for podcast episodes and scenes in audiobooks. To prevent misuse, as with Designer and Image Creator, Microsoft says it’s implemented filters to reject DALL-E 2 prompts from Azure OpenAI Service customers that violate content policy. The company also claims it’s integrated techniques to prevent DALL-E 2 from creating images of religious objects and celebrities, plus objects commonly used to try to trick the system into generating sexual or violent content. And Microsoft says it’s added models that remove AI-generated images appearing to contain adult, gore and other types of “inappropriate” content. Generations from Mattel using DALL-E 2. Image Credits: Microsoft “Microsoft is making access available by invitation-only to give us the opportunity to collaborate with customers and create safeguards to prevent harmful uses and unwanted outcomes as customers bring their applications to production,” a Microsoft spokesperson told ZebethMedia via email. “Collaborations with these early customers will help us make sure the responsible AI safeguards are working in practice.” Beyond DALL-E 2, Microsoft gave a general update on Azure OpenAI Service’s growth since its launch roughly a year ago. Companies using the service now span industries including financial services, insurance and healthcare, the company said, including brands like Accenture, Avanade, Autodesk, BMW Group, CarMax, EY and PwC. Some of the most common use cases include writing assistance, natural language-to-code generation and parsing data to generate insights. For example, PwC is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to classify various news articles into environment, social and governance topics for benchmarking purposes, while CarMax is using the service to generate new marketing content based on customer reviews.

Microsoft’s Edge browser gets shared Workspaces, new security features and more • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Apps, browsers, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Ignite 2022No Comments

It’s Microsoft Ignite this week and while a lot of the announcements this week target the kinds of IT professionals and admins who really need more deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Service through Azure Arc, the company is also announcing a few user-facing updates to its Edge browser. The most important of these is likely Edge Workspaces, a new feature (currently in preview) that will allow teams to share browser tabs. Microsoft argues that this feature can be useful when bringing on new team members to an existing project. Instead of sharing lots of links and files, the team can simply share a single like to an Edge Workspace (which will then likely consist of lots of links and files, but hey, at least it’s just one link to share). As the project evolves, the tabs are updated in real time. I guess that’s a use case. We’ve seen our share of extensions that do similar things, none of which ever get very popular. Meanwhile, teams share these links and files in other ways (think Confluent, etc.). Image Credits: Microsoft On the security front, Microsoft is bringing typo protection for website URLs to the browser, promising to protect “users from accidentally navigating to online fraud sites after misspelling the website address by suggesting the website that the user intended.” Nothing too complicated here, and a useful feature for sure. Also new is an opt-in enhanced security mode that automatically applies the most conservative settings when you surf to unfamiliar websites. It disables just-in-time JavaScript compilation, for example. The idea here is that users and admins can set off often a user has to visit a site before it’s considered ‘familiar’ and set the level of security accordingly. That won’t help if a familiar site is hacked and somebody introduces malicious code, but it should prevent quite a few security issues. Finally, Microsoft is also introducing a number of new accessibility features. Edge now features live captions when audio is playing (taking a cue from Google’s playbook on Android) and an enhanced narrator experience now provides more contextual information about fields and buttons for visually impaired users. With this update, screen readers can now also read Edge’s Instant Answers for queries like “Seattle weather.” And with page colors, users will soon be able to change — you guess it — page colors to improve readability and color contrast.

Microsoft refreshes the Surface Laptop, Pro and Studio • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Gadgets, Hardware, Microsoft, microsoft surface, Surface, surface laptop, surface pro, surface studioNo Comments

Microsoft introduced a deluge of upgraded Surface products during a virtual keynote this morning. Detailed in a blog post penned by Chief Product Officer, Panos Panay, the Laptop 5 gets top billing here. The devoted touchscreen notebook arrives in 13.5- and 15-inch models, powered by Intel Evo, which the company claims will make it “50% more powerful than their predecessor.” Image Credits: Microsoft The 13-inch model arrives with a 12th Gen Core i5, upgradable to i7, while the larger version is available with the latter. This time out, AMD won’t be available for the system. Both models do, however, not have Thunderbolt 4 support built in. The 13- and 15-inch models start at $1,000 and $1,300, respectively. Not a huge update this time out, unfortunately. The company devotes more words to the Surface Pro 9, which is available in both Intel and Arm flavors. The convertible, which celebrates a decade of life this year, has a 13-inch touchscreen, with support for Vision IQ (Intel only, apparently), Dolby’s feature that adjust display settings based on ambient light. That system also starts at $1,000 for the Intel model and $1,300 for the Arm. The Laptop and Pro arrive October 25. Lastly, but certainly not leastly is the Surface Studio 2+. As the name suggests, it’s less of a full upgrade to the convertible all-in-one, but instead something more akin to a souped-up version of its predecessor. The design remains the same, with a 28-inch touchscreen display that’s adjustable via the Gravity Hinge. When lowered, artists can interact with it more along the lines of a Wacom Cintiq drawing tablet. Says Panay. we’ve rearchitected our Surface Studio processing engine utilizing an updated Intel Core H-35 processor, with up to 50% faster CPU performance. We’ve designed NVIDIA Ge Force RTX 3060 discrete graphics to double the graphics performance, achieving the most realistic ray-traced graphics when you craft 3D design or render models. We’ve enhanced and modernized the display, cameras, Studio Mics, and ports –including USB-C with Thunderbolt 4. With Windows 11, Surface Studio 2+also meets Secured-core PC standards. Image Credits: Microsoft Powered by the Intel Core u7, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, the Studio runs $4,300. The company will toss in a mouse, keyboard and stylus for another $200.

Microsoft brings DALL-E 2 to the masses with Designer and Image Creator • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Apps, Azure OpenAI Service, dall-e 2, image generation, Microsoft, Microsoft Ignite 2022, OpenAI, Robotics & AINo Comments

Microsoft is making a major investment in DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s AI-powered system that generates images from text, by bringing it to first-party apps and services. During its Ignite conference this week, Microsoft announced that it’s integrating DALL-E 2 with the newly announced Microsoft Designer app and Image Creator tool in Bing and Microsoft Edge. With the advent of DALL-E 2 and open source alternatives like Stable Diffusion in recent years, AI image generators have exploded in popularity. In September, OpenAI said that more than 1.5 million users were actively creating over 2 million images a day with DALL-E 2, including artists, creative directors and authors. Brands such as Stitch Fix, Nestlé and Heinz have piloted DALL-E 2 for ad campaigns and other commercial use cases, while certain architectural firms have used DALL-E 2 and tools akin to it to conceptualize new buildings. “Microsoft and OpenAI have partnered closely since 2019 to accelerate breakthroughs in AI. We have teamed up with OpenAI to develop, test and responsibly scale the latest AI technologies,” Microsoft CVP of modern life, search and devices Liat Ben-Zur told ZebethMedia via email. “Microsoft is the exclusive provider of cloud computing services to OpenAI and is OpenAI’s preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies. We’ve started to do this through programs like the Azure OpenAI Service and GitHub Copilot, and we’ll continue to explore solutions that harness the power of AI and advanced natural language generation.” Seeking to bring OpenAI’s tech to an even wider audience, Microsoft is launching Designer, a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. Designer — whose announcement leaked repeatedly this spring and summer — leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2 to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization. Within Designer, users can choose from various templates to get started on specific, defined-dimensions designs for platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn Facebook ads and Instagram Stories. Prebuilt templates are available from the web, as are shapes, photos, icons and headings that can be added to projects. Image Creator in Microsoft Edge and Bing. “Microsoft Designer is powered by AI technology, including DALL-E 2, which means the ability to instantly generate a variety of designs,” Ben-Zur continued. “[It] helps you bring your ideas to life. Designer will remain free during a limited preview period, Microsoft says — users can sign up starting today. Once the Designer app is generally available, it’ll be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and have “some” functionality free to use for non-subscribers, though Microsoft didn’t elaborate. Another new Microsoft-developed app underpinned by DALL-E 2 is Image Creator, heading to Bing and Edge in the coming weeks. As the name implies, Image Creator — accessed via the Bing Images tab or bing.com/create, or through the Image Creator icon in the sidebar within Edge — generates art given a text prompt by funneling requests to DALL-E 2, acting like a frontend client for OpenAI’s still-in-beta DALL-E 2 service. Typing in a description of something, any additional context, like location or activity, and an art style will yield an image from Image Creator. “Image Creator will soon create images that don’t yet exist, limited only by your imagination,” Ben-Zur added. Unlike Designer, Image Creator in Bing and Edge will be completely free to use, but Microsoft — wary of potential abuse and misuse — says it’ll take a “measured approach” to rolling out the app. Image Creator will initially only be available in preview for select geographies, which Microsoft says will allow it to gather feedback before expanding the app further. Microsoft Designer. Some image-generating systems have been used to create objectionable content, like graphic violence and pornographic, nonconsensual celebrity deepfakes. The organization funding the development of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, was even the subject of a critical recent letter from U.S. House Representative Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) to the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in which she urged the NSA and OSTP to address the release of “unsafe AI models” that “do not moderate content made on their platforms.” Image-generating AI can also pick up on the biases and toxicities embedded in the millions of images from the web used to train them. OpenAI itself noted in an academic paper that an open source implementation of DALL-E could be trained to make stereotypical associations like generating images of white-passing men in business suits for terms like “CEO,” for example. In response to questions about mitigation measures in Designer and Image Creator, Microsoft noted that OpenAI removed explicit sexual and violent content from the dataset used to train DALL-E 2. But Microsoft also said that it took steps of its own, including deploying filters to limit the generation of images that violate content policy, additional query blocking on sensitive topics and technology to deliver “more diverse” images to results. Users will have to agree to terms of use and the aforementioned content policy to start using Designer and Image Creator with their Microsoft account. If a user requests an image deemed inappropriate by Microsoft’s automated filters, they’ll get a warning. If they repeatedly violate the content policy, they’ll be banned, but have a chance to appeal. “It’s important, with early technologies like DALL-E 2, to acknowledge that this is new, and we expect it to continue to evolve and improve,” Ben-Zur said. “We take our commitment to responsible AI seriously … We will not allow users to generate violent content, we may distort people’s faces and won’t show text strings used as input.” Addressing some of the legal questions that’ve sprung up recently around AI-powered image generation systems, Microsoft says that users will have “full” usage rights to commercialize the images they create with Designer and Image Creator. (Among other hosts, Getty Images has banned the upload and sale of illustrations generated using DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and similar tools, citing fair use concerns about training

Meta partners with Microsoft to bring Teams, Windows apps and games to Quest devices • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Apps, Gaming, meta, Meta Connect 2022, Microsoft, Quest, Quest Pro, xboxNo Comments

Meta today announced a partnership with Microsoft to bring new content, including Windows apps and Teams tie-ins, to Meta’s metaverse hardware efforts. During Meta’s Connect conference this morning, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft Teams will integrate with Quest devices and that Microsoft will provide a way to stream Windows apps to Meta’s headsets. Nadella also revealed that Microsoft’s streaming game service, Xbox Cloud Gaming, will arrive on Quest devices sometime within the coming months. Image Credits: Meta “We’re bringing the Microsoft Teams immersive meeting experience to Meta Quest in order to give people new ways to connect with each other,” Nadella said, noting that custom avatars will eventually come to the experience. Horizon Workrooms, Meta’s VR space for collaboration, will connect with Teams, he added — allowing people to join a Teams meeting directly from Workrooms. “Now, you can connect, share and collaborate as though you are together in person,” Nadella added. On the Windows end, Nadella said that Microsoft 365 will come to Quest in a way that lets users interact with content from productivity apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The Verge’s Tom Warren notes that these aren’t full-blown versions of apps designed for VR, importantly; They’re Progressive Web Apps, rather. “You [will] have a new way to securely stream the entire Windows experience, including all the personalized app content settings to your VR device with the full power [of Windows,]” Nadella said. “We’ve been thinking about how to bring the power of Microsoft 365 and Windows 365 to 3D spaces to really help drive productivity and enable you to create, communicate and collaborate in completely new ways.” Image Credits: Meta As for Xbox Cloud Gaming, on the Quest, it’ll stream games to a 2D VR screen, supporting existing Xbox controllers. But Nadella hinted that additional features might arrive down the line. Microsoft’s team-up with Meta comes as the former dials back its internal VR and AR hardware projects, including HoloLens. Windows Mixed Reality platform, Microsoft’s software foundation built into Windows 10 to support VR headsets, never quite took off in the way the company hoped. Early this year, Business Insider reported that Microsoft scrapped plans for the third generation of HoloLens in favor of partnering with Samsung on a new “mixed-reality” device. Microsoft pushed back on the HoloLens assertions. But then, one of the executives leading HoloLens’ development, Alex Kipman, resigned after allegations of misconduct including inappropriate sexual behavior, leaving the division in flux. That being said, Microsoft has shown a keen interest in investing in creating software for the metaverse — whatever form it might take. At its Ignite conference last year, the company announced Mesh for Teams, which combines the company’s Mesh platform for powering shared experiences in virtual reality, augmented reality and elsewhere with Teams and its built-in productivity tools.