Monday.com has launched its Portfolio management solution to give managers a full view of their projects.
The work management software provider has added the new offering within its broader work management product.
Created with enterprise customers in mind, monday.com believes the solution gives portfolio managers a user-friendly interface through which it can help to bring a clearer project overview without needing to manually sort through numerous reports.
Daniel Lereya, Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com, explains what it is that sets this solution apart from the rest: “We constantly strive to provide our customers with the best solutions for their business needs, and this latest release of Portfolio demonstrates that commitment.
“We are democratising project portfolio management methods by making them easy to master, which is a major differentiator to others in the market.
“With our Portfolio management solution, our enterprise customers will now have a strong connection between everyday work and high-level insights, providing a top-down view that drives efficiency and effectiveness.”
‘Portfolio Integrates the Entire Workflow’
The Portfolio solution allows customers to switch between high and low priority projects and portfolios.
Monday.com’s related press release also states that it is capable of integrating with the entire workflow by connecting to project request Monday boards for work data.
Following project approvals, monday.com’s automation features converts the project information and requirements into a template. These templates are then controlled by the company’s latest standardisation capability, currently in beta.
Key benefits of the solution include not requiring any setup, allowing customers to begin using the project management software immediately and, ultimately, improving productivity from the get-go.
Workflows can be integrated through added automation, project intake customisations, and using templates to create consistency with templates.
Organisations can personalise their experiences by adding fields, dashboards, and more.
Chris Funk, Senior Director of Product Innovation at Zippo Manufacturing, shared his review of the new portfolio management system:
“Monday.com’s Portfolio management solution allows us to understand what the decisions we make today mean for tomorrow.”
Getting Started
Monday.com’s support pages explain how users can add the portfolio solution to their account.
First, navigate to the left pan and click on the blue plus sign. Next, select “New Portfolio”, create a name for it. Finally, choose whether to make the board ‘main’ or ‘private’ and click “Create”. Your brand new portfolio board will be up and running within a matter of seconds.
To add existing project boards to a portfolio, click the “Add project” button and then select the specific board from your account.
You can also get a Portfolio Health Snapshot to gain a simple view of how projects are progressing. It will display a completion percentage for each project, planned versus actual timelines, and more.
In January this year, UC Today’s Rebekah Carter created comprehensive guide to monday.com, including all the features, pricing pros, and cons. Although monday.com’s pricing structure can be bit complex and some features are restricted to premium accounts, the pricing is generally affordable, customer support is excellent, there are third-party app integrations available, great CRM solutions, and other top notch features.
Similarly, in February, 2023, the UC Today Team reviewed monday.com for Microsoft Teams, ultimately concluding that there are a number of ways in which monday.com could improve your Teams experience.
By Dave Michels Effective automation and CX really starts with understanding what your customers want – and topic modeling can unearth the real needs your customers have.
In this insightful UC Today video, Dave Michels of TalkingPointz sits down with Samuel Wilson, CEO of 8×8, to delve into the rapidly evolving landscape of unified communications (UC) and contact centers (CC).
With over seven years at 8×8 and a diverse background in finance, customer experience, and business strategy, Samuel provides a unique perspective on the industry’s trends and future directions.
In this engaging conversation, Dave and Samuel discuss the critical developments in the unified communications and contact center space. With a year under his belt as the official 8×8 Chief, Samuel shares his journey and insights into 8×8’s innovative strategies and market trends.
Unified Communications and Contact Centers Integration: Samuel highlights the natural convergence of UC and CC, emphasizing the efficiency and synergy of having a single provider for both services. He discusses 8×8’s decade-long presence in this integrated market and the addition of CPAS in 2019, predicting that more companies will follow this path.
The Future of Digital-Only Contact Centers: The conversation touches on the increasing importance of digital channels in contact centers. Samuel reveals 8×8’s plans for a digital-only contact center offering and explains the significance of blended interactions, where agents can handle both voice and digital communications seamlessly.
Generative AI in CCaaS: Addressing the rise of AI, Samuel explains how 8×8 leverages generative AI from major players like OpenAI and Google to enhance transcription and analytics. He believes that integrating AI into their platform offers significant value without the need for separate AI vendors.
Discover expert insights with Dave Michels, Principal Analyst at TalkingPointz and author of the TalkingPointz Insider report. Dive into a concise, in-depth analysis of enterprise communications. Choose from free or premium subscriptions at TalkingPointz.
The FCC has announced that it’s taking more direct aim at prison phone and videoconferencing monopolies that have a long history of ripping off inmates and their families.
According to an agency announcement, the FCC has voted to further lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole allowing companies to charge exorbitant rates for intrastate calls.
“Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10,” the FCC said.
The agency said the new rules will also cut the cost of video visitation calls to less than a quarter of current prices, while requiring per-minute rate options based on consumers’ actual usage. The new rules will take effect in January of 2025 for prisons with more than 1,000 inmates, and in all smaller jails starting in April of 2025.
However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families.
Previous efforts to rein in prison monopolies were undermined by the Trump FCC and former FCC boss Ajit Pai, who worked for prison phone giant Securus before his time at the agency. Trump and Pai pulled the rug out from under the agencies own lawyers’ feet while they were trying to defend their efforts in court, resulting in a legal loss.
The good news for Meta is that, unlike pretty much every AI startup, it already makes a lot of money. Last quarter, the company made just over $39 billion in revenue, up 22 percent from a year ago, and about $13.5 billion in profit, up 73 percent. 3.27 billion people use at least one of Meta’s apps every day. That kind of scale and money buys the ability to make big bets, which Zuckerberg is famous for doing.
On Meta’s Wednesday earnings call, CFO Susan Li reiterated to investors that financial returns from its recent AI investments will “come in over a longer period of time.”...
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, wearing Boeing spacesuits, wave as they prepare to depart the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy Space Center for Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida to board the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft for the Crew Flight Test launch, on June 5, 2024. | Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty Images
Nearly two months after launch and almost 50 days after they were initially supposed to return to Earth, two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station finally appear to be closer to their homeward voyage. That they were trapped by troubles with their Boeing Starliner spacecraft has only raised fresh doubts about the company’s technological and engineering capabilities as it weathers several major scandals.
The two astronauts who made the journey on the Starliner, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, have been at the ISS longer than initially intended, though NASA and Boeing both insist the astronauts are not “stranded,” as some headlines have indicated. They have reserves of oxygen and supplies and could use other spacecraft docked at the station if they needed to make a quick exit back to Earth.
The trip was always intended as a test voyage for the spacecraft, and Boeing and NASA have said that the time spent understanding and fixing the spacecraft’s issues — multiple helium leaks and thrusters that shut off unexpectedly — while it was in space was valuable.
“We don’t understand the issues enough to fix them permanently, and the only way that we can do that is take the time in this unique environment and get more data, run more tests,” Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program, said in a June press conference.
On Saturday, NASA and Boeing engineers performed tests on 27 of the spacecraft’s 28 thrusters, the system that propels the Starliner into space. On Tuesday, the space agency announced that the tested thrusters were performing well enough to bring the spacecraft back to Earth, and that after looking at the testing data, Boeing and NASA would determine a date for the vessel and its crew to leave the station.
None of this means Boeing’s space program is on track; it has struggled ever since its initial contract with the US government was signed, and it’s not clear whether the company will be able to change course in time for the Starliner to be ready for the missions it was designed for.
How the Boeing Starliner’s test mission expanded from 10 days to 55 and counting
NASA and Boeing’s initial plan was to have the Starliner bring astronauts to and from the ISS on a regular basis by this year. To do that safely meant test flights like this one, as problems — even deadly ones — are not unheard of when it comes to space travel.
The Starliner, though, faced problems before even getting off the ground. The initial launch date, May 6, was delayed because of a faulty pressure regulation valve on the liquid oxygen tank that, along with a source of liquid hydrogen, enables rocket propulsion. Then, a helium leak in the service module — where the propulsion system is located, many of the craft’s instruments are held, and which disconnects from the spacecraft during the return to Earth — pushed back the new scheduled May 25 launch date.
Though engineers understood that leak to be manageable, three other helium leaks emerged when the spacecraft docked on June 6 at the ISS. Another problem, this time with five of the Starliner’s 28 reaction control systems thrusters, which help the spacecraft navigate, emerged then, too. That meant the spacecraft was unable to dock at the ISS until engineers on the ground could figure out how to position the spacecraft to dock safely.
After testing both on the ground at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico and in space, the thrusters seem to be working appropriately, which will be critical for getting the astronauts back down to Earth. Essentially, the crew will now be able to point the Starliner in the right direction before different engines propel it on the return journey. The helium leaks, too, seem to have stabilized. However, there is still no date set for a return mission.
“I don’t see this as being anything critical, or life-threatening,” Laura Forczyk, the executive director of the space consulting group Astralytical told NPR. “I just think they’re being extra cautious as they should be, because this vehicle is not operating as intended.”
The Boeing commercial space project has been a fraught one, and it’s not just this Starliner test mission.
Since the joint venture between Boeing and NASA was started in 2014, there have been three problematic launches. The spacecraft’s 2019 test flight had to be cut short due to a software issue that prevented docking at the ISS. (There was no crew aboard this flight.) The Starliner, still uncrewed, successfully docked at the ISS in 2022, although there were several other technical problems in the intervening years.
In the meantime, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has made several successful trips into space since 2020 — and one of the vehicles that Williams and Wilmore could use to come back to Earth should some other issues arise with the Starliner is SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
Boeing’s been in big trouble lately
The Starliner’s first mission, carrying at least three astronauts, is tentatively scheduled for no earlier than August 2025, in order to give the NASA and Boeing teams time to fix the issues that have emerged in this test flight. By that time, the entire purpose of the project will be nearly moot; the ISS is scheduled to shut down in 2030.
Boeing’s space troubles are just part of the problems plaguing the company, which is primarily known as a commercial aircraft and defense industry manufacturer. It has been under significant scrutiny because of the multiple dangerous failures of its 737 Max commercial plane.
There was a terrifying incident in January, in which a door plug flew open on an Alaska Airlines flight, and two deadly plane crashes in 2018 and 2019. As Vox’s Whizy Kim wrote in January:
Boeing and Alaska Airlines are also embroiled in a lawsuit over the January incident. Boeing and the Justice Department have entered into a plea agreement relating to the 2018 Lion Air and 2019 Ethiopian Airlines flights that killed 189 and 157 people, respectively. Boeing will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the FAA in evaluating the 737 Max, likely avoiding a criminal trial that could expose further wrongdoing.
Under the agreement, the company will be fined $487.2 million and will owe restitution to the victims’ families, who are already opposing the deal.
Boeing’s many serious missteps are, as Vox’s Marin Cogan wrote in March, due at least in part to a highly corporatized structure at the company that in recent decades has focused less on solid engineering than on shareholder returns.
All of the issues — the backed-up space program, the serious incidents involving the 737 Max — are part of the same problematic system at Boeing. Whether the company will face its problems and change its operations remains to be seen.
The Ford Explorer’s new Digital Experience software. | Image: Ford
Ford’s new Android-powered infotainment system is finally coming to a Ford-branded vehicle. The automaker’s so-called Digital Experience, which debuted with the 2024 Lincoln Nautilus earlier this year, will power the new 2025 Ford Explorer SUV, the company announced today.
The 2025 Ford Explorer includes many of the Digital Experience’s main features, including built-in Google Maps, Google Play Store, Google Assistant, wireless CarPlay and Android Auto, and digital HVAC controls. It doesn't have the extravagant 48-inch panoramic screen setup that the Lincoln Nautilus has, but from the looks of it, the main 13.2-inch touchscreen has the same interface. And the Explorer’s 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster can project maps for the first...
Elon Musk at "Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation: Mark Read in Conversation with Elon Musk" during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2024 – Day Three on June 19, 2024, in Cannes, France. | Marc Piasecki/Getty Images<br>
Former President Donald Trump used to be persona non grata in Silicon Valley.
Nearly all of the dollars spent by Silicon Valley elites in 2016 went to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In 2020, those elites spent even more to defeat Trump. The few who supported Trump that year — such as venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and Palantir — did so knowing they were standing on a third rail, and many did not speak openly about it for fear of backlash that could hurt their businesses.
Something has changed since the last election cycle.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk, who endorsed Trump Saturday after the assassination attempt against him, planned to send $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC starting in July. (Musk appeared to push back on the reporting with a meme on X reading: “FAKE GNUS.”)
One of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, has also recently indicated that it will donate large amounts to PACs supporting Trump.
“The Blue Wall of tech is crumbling before our very eyes,” Ryan Selkis, the founder and CEO of the crypto research firm Messari, wrote on X last month.
Selkis’s assessment might not be entirely true. By most indications, Silicon Valley is still overwhelmingly Democratic. But tech elites who are supporting Trump seem to be more comfortable doing so openly and without fear of being ostracized for it.
Why some Silicon Valley leaders are backing Trump
Silicon Valley is not undergoing a seismic rightward shift.
As of 2022, a little over half of voters in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties (which encompass Silicon Valley) were registered Democrats. That share hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. The share of voters with no party preference has increased, while the share of Republican voters shrank to about 15 percent in 2022.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists also seem to be supporting Democrats at a higher-than-average rate compared to the last 10 election cycles. A recent Wired analysis found that Democrats received $2 for every dollar that Republicans received from the 20 firms that, together with their employees, made the most political contributions.
That suggests Silicon Valley’s political views are still largely consistent with a 2017 study indicating that wealthy technologists supported many liberal policies: redistribution of wealth, abortion, gay rights, immigration, and more.
But there was one issue on which, even in 2017, they chafed with Democrats: They didn’t want the government to interfere in the operation of their businesses. And that might be driving at least some of the support for Trump among Silicon Valley elites this election cycle.
President Joe Biden has taken a hardline approach against Big Tech that might be perceived by some donors as overreach. The administration has filed sweeping antitrust lawsuits against four major tech companies: Apple, Google (now known as Alphabet), Meta, and Amazon.
Since the downfall of the crypto exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the Biden administration has also cracked down on crypto, filing lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance and trying to advance more stringent regulation.
Trump’s new running mate, J.D. Vance, seems to broadly share the Biden administration’s philosophy: he has applauded Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission behind the antitrust suits against Big Tech. It’s not clear whether he will temper that position now that he’s running for vice president, but some tech titans seem to be supporting the Republican ticket anyway.
Andreessen Horowitz had previously suggested that government regulation would determine which party receives their dollars. “We are non-partisan, one-issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them,” the firm announced in December.
In a video posted on Tuesday, founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz further explained why their firm would be supporting Trump.
“The future of our business, the future of … new technology, and the future of America is literally at stake,” Horowitz said, acknowledging that he would be angering friends and family. “We think Donald Trump is actually the right choice.”
Crypto leaders, who have for years poured money into the fight against further regulation of the industry, have also contributed more heavily to Republicans. The crypto PAC Stand With Crypto has not issued an endorsement in the presidential race but has identified Trump and Robert F. Kennedy as better options than Biden.
Beyond regulation, it seems that some Silicon Valley billionaires are becoming more vocal in their support of Trump just because they can without suffering boycotts or lots of bad press. For instance, Musk has always been a bit of a contrarian but seems to have taken on a more politically active presence online since he bought Twitter and renamed it X. And while his stance may have cost him users and advertisers early in his X tenure, his endorsement of Trump has yet to be met with a similar backlash.
Biden is on the back foot on fundraising
The support Trump is receiving from a few wealthy patrons in Silicon Valley should nevertheless worry the Biden campaign.
As of the last campaign finance reports through the end of May, Trump had surpassed Biden in cash on hand. Trump had $116.6 million in his campaign coffers compared to Biden’s $91.6 million.
That advantage has likely only grown in the months since. Biden has reportedly struggled with fundraising since his disastrous debate performance last month. Some donors think he should drop out and have promised to suspend donations to Democrats until he does so; others have paused contributions while they wait for assurance that he will not be replaced with another Democratic candidate.
‘The company has carefully examined and evaluated the impact of the U.S. legal requirements and made this sad and difficult decision as business opportunities in the country are no longer viable,’ says the Moscow-based antivirus software company.
Microsoft Teams transcription is a convenient feature built into Microsoft Teams that can save you time and effort taking notes during lengthy meetings. It might not seem like the most exciting feature Teams has to offer, particularly now that you can access everything from Immersive Spaces to an AI Copilot on the platform – but it comes in handy.
Automatic meeting transcriptions are great for when you need to review meeting content at a later date, catch up with minutes you’ve missed, or even improve accessibility.
So, how do you enable Microsoft Teams transcription?
I’ve created this step-by-step guide to help you get started.
What is Microsoft Teams Transcription?
In Microsoft Teams meetings, and events, users have the option to enable automatic transcription. There are two ways you can access these transcriptions. Either you can download and share them alongside a recording of your meeting, or you can view transcriptions in real-time.
Notably, transcriptions aren’t quite the same as live captions, which disappear at the end of the meeting. Additionally, you can access captions with a Microsoft Teams free or personal account. Transcriptions, on the other hand, are only available on the desktop version of Teams for customers with specific premium licenses.
At the start of a meeting or event, you can enable transcription and recording, or you can simply keep transcription turned off, and just record the meeting. I’d recommend using the transcription setting for most conversations however. It just makes it a lot easier to search through content.
How to Enable Transcription in Microsoft Teams: Admin Guide
The first thing you’ll need to do if you want people to be able to access Microsoft Teams transcription features, is enable the feature for your team. You can enable transcriptions in two ways – the easiest option is definitely to just use the Microsoft Teams Admin Center.
Go to Meetings→ Meeting policies, then scroll down to Audio & video
Toggle on “Allow transcription”
By default, transcripts will be shown in the language spoken during the conversation. However Microsoft Teams Premium customers can access live translated captions too. Again, admins just need to toggle “Transcription” to “On” to enable this.
Once you turn transcription settings on, you’ll be able to customize your settings a little more. For instance, you can create different policies within your admin center that allow you to give Microsoft Teams Transcription to all users (Global), or just certain team members.
You can also configure other settings within the Admin Center, such as:
Enabling cloud recording
Selecting a transcription storage destination (an average one-hour meeting takes up around 400MB between the recording and transcript, so make sure you have enough storage space)
There’s also the option to allow real-time captions, which display transcriptions during the call.
Enable Microsoft Teams Transcription with PowerShell
The second way to enable Transcription in Microsoft Teams, is to use PowerShell commands. This is a little trickier for beginners, but Microsoft has handily shared some helpful guidance to get you started. Basically, you’ll need to use the parameter “-AllowTranscription”, in the Set-CSTeamsMeetingPolicy section to enable transcription.
From there, you can give all your users transcriptions as part of the Global policy change.
If users have their own assigned policy, they won’t be a part of the Global policy. Admins can adjust this by using a cmdlet to remove policy assignments.
PowerShell also lets you set how many users can transcribe meetings, whether it’s all of them, most of them, or a select few.
One other option you can consider if Microsoft Teams Transcription just doesn’t cut it for you, is to add an application to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft’s AI-powered transcription features are fantastic, but they do have some possible limitations. For instance, you can’t instantly generate summaries from them without using AI tools, or pinpoint action items.
If you want more functionality, then you could consider an AI meeting assistant or transcription tool from a vendor like Krisp, or Otter. You should be able to find plenty of apps that support transcription, translation and summarization in the Microsoft App store.
Just remember, some of these apps might come with extra monthly fees.
How to Enable Transcription in Microsoft Teams: For Users
Once admins enable transcription in Microsoft Teams, individual users need to turn the feature on when they attend a meeting. Notably, not everyone can access all transcription features.
Organizers and people from the same organization can all start, stop, and view transcriptions in real-time and after a meeting. Only the organizer can download transcripts and share them with other team members. People from other tenants, and anonymous users can’t access transcripts.
Additionally, with Teams Premium, admins and organizers can also assign more rules to who can transcribe meetings, assigning permissions to co-organizers, organizers, presenters, or no-one.
If you’re a user with permission to transcribe a meeting, here’s what you’ll need to do:
Launch a meeting and go to the More Options section
Choose Record and Transcribe – You can either record and transcribe the meeting, or just record the meeting without the transcription
All your meeting attendees will be notified that the transcription has begun, and they can choose to view it in real-time. If you want to stop the recording or transcription, just go back into the More Options menu.
Other Options for Microsoft Teams Transcription
There are a couple of ways to customize your transcription experience. While you can only create transcriptions in the language you’re speaking, Microsoft will automatically assume you’re speaking English. If you’re not, you can head to Transcription Settings at the top right of your live transcription window. Hover over the Spoken Language option, and choose the right language.
Hit Confirm, and the transcript should switch to your language. There are 41 languages to choose from, but altering this setting will change the language for all of your meeting participants.
Another option is to turn on Live Captions. You don’t necessarily need to do this, as you can view your transcript in real-time anyway on Microsoft Teams. However, if you’re just recording a meeting without the transcription, head to the More Actions button, and click on Language and Speech.
From there, choose Turn on live captions. Desktop users can change the caption language to their preferred “spoken language”, without affecting the rest of the team.
You can also enable CART (Communication access real-time translation) in Microsoft Teams. This basically means you give an URL for your meeting to a professional who can transcribe the meeting for you. This can be a slightly more accurate option for some complex meetings.
To enable CART transcriptions, click Meeting Options, and select Provide CART Captions to generate your URL.
Live Translated Captions in Microsoft Teams
As mentioned above, Live Translated Captions are only an option for people with the Teams Premium add-on license. If you have this license, when you join a meeting in Teams, click Start Live Transcription then in the right-side pane, select the Transcription settings option.
Hover over Transcript language, and select the language you want to see the transcription in. You can even view the original and translated transcripts side-by-side by toggling on the option to see both transcripts in real-time.
Viewing and Sharing Microsoft Teams Transcriptions
Throughout your Teams meeting, you can view your transcription in real time in the panel on the right side of the screen. You can open and close this panel at any point during your meeting.
Once a meeting ends, the transcript and recording are saved to your selected destination. The files are all classified as tenant-only content, meaning admins will have access to them even if the person who initially hosted the meeting leaves the company.
Meeting organizers or co-organizers should be able to download transcriptions as a .VTT or .DOCX file. However, organizers and admins can also give other people permission to download the transcript. The easiest way to download a transcript is via the Calendar in Teams.
Go to the Calendar in Teams
Open the meeting event and go to Recordings & Transcripts
Click the Download button on the top of the page and choose the file type as which to save it
You can also download transcripts from the Chat section in Teams within the Meeting chat. Open the meeting chat, select the transcript, and in the Recap tab, select the arrow next to Download and choose the type of file you want.
Admins and meeting organizers can upload transcripts into the Chat section to make it available to every meeting participant too – including those who joined from a mobile device.
To delete a transcript, open the meeting and select the Recap option, then choose Delete above the transcript.
Why Use Microsoft Teams Transcription?
Transcriptions aren’t mandatory for your Microsoft Teams meetings, but they’re handy. They give you a word-for-word account of everything said in a meeting, which you can access live and after the call ends.
It’s much easier than taking notes during a meeting, and it might be cheaper than relying on Microsoft Copilot to do the work for you.
Transcripts can even show you which employees said what during a meeting, unless someone joins your conversation “anonymously.” Users can attend meetings anonymously (depending on your admin settings), by visiting their own Settings page on Teams, clicking Captions and Transcripts and toggling “Automatically identify me” off.
On top of giving you better notes from your meetings, translations can be extremely handy if you want to save data from sensitive conversations for compliance purposes.
Here are the top reasons we recommend using Microsoft Teams Captions:
Comprehensive Meeting Recap
Sometimes, people have to miss a meeting or at least a moment of it. Maybe they get sick, or get pulled away for a higher priority meeting, or even have to step out for a minute and end up missing something important. In cases like these, having transcripts ready as soon as the meeting is over helps make sure everyone has a record of the entire conversation, and no one misses an important detail.
Plus, Microsoft Teams Transcription means you don’t have to rely on team members to take notes themselves throughout a conversation. They can actually focus on what’s happening in the meeting instead, which can boost productivity.
Microsoft Teams Transcription Boosts Accessibility
Not everyone hears the same. Millions of people in the US alone have hearing loss ranging from mild to profound, so a little help can go a long way. Transcripts and real-time captions assist there by providing a written element to support the conversation, helping attendees catch what’s being said during or after the meeting.
Compliance and Record Keeping
Keeping records of meetings and conversations can be particularly important for industries like legal or financial services. In these cases, having transcripts for calls and meetings means you have a complete record of everything that was said, which is handy in legal situations.
You can go back through the transcript and see who said what, so you’ll have records for things like agreements, quoted prices, and account details. Legal and HR departments will also appreciate having the transcripts on file, should any disputes arise.
Improved Training
Transcripts are also helpful outside of meeting notes, as they can be used for teaching new employees. For customer support environments, for instance, transcripts can provide written examples of great customer interactions employees can reference while training.
Even outside of customer environments, transcripts can give employees who weren’t in the meetings a look behind the curtain so they’ll know what topics are discussed in meetings with clients or managers.
Customer Support
Transcripts are also helpful for customer service teams for more than just training. Keeping transcripts of customer support calls on file makes it easier to keep clear records of issues (and resolutions), review conversations, and provide better customer support. Transcripts can also be saved to call logs in a CRM, and are easy to quickly skim or search to find information from previous calls.
Plus, sales teams can track down client conversations, identify where they are in a sales funnel, and personalize interactions to increase conversions.
Enable Microsoft Teams Transcriptions
Enabling and saving transcripts on Microsoft Teams is a simple task. All you need to do is enable transcription in Microsoft Teams as an admin for your employees and ask them to record and transcribe their next meeting with the steps above.
Having transcriptions on hand makes it easy to access notes, review previous meetings, and keep everyone on the same page. It can boost the accessibility and productivity of your meetings and reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
Now that you know how it’s done, try turning your transcripts on for your next meeting.
Like Windows and macOS computers, Chromebooks handle file deletion in two steps. Initially, the files aren’t actually deleted, even though they disappear from view. They’re kept around in what is called the Trash, just in case you ever need them back, and then are wiped automatically after a certain amount of time. However, if you’re dealing with sensitive information or selling your device, you can also permanently erase them.
ChromeOS, the operating system behind Chromebooks, actually gives you two file systems to think about: one in the cloud (in other words, Google Drive) and one that is local. Each of these systems handles deleted files slightly differently. And note that there’s no syncing between the trash folder for local files...
By Dave Michels Many companies are not really asking themselves how to improve their customer service. Rather, they’re engaging in active experiments to figure out how much they can get away with.
A judge overseeing Redbox owner Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment’s bankruptcy case granted a request Wednesday to convert it from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 bankruptcy, according to Lowpass’ Janko Roettgers and The Wall Street Journal. The company’s lawyers said Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment will lay off its remaining 1,000 employees and liquidate the businesses, including streaming operations and the 24,000 or so disc kiosks that have rented out DVDs, Blu-rays, and videogames for years.
According to Roettgers, Judge Thomas Horan said, “There is no means to continue to pay employees, pay any bills, otherwise finance this case. It is hopelessly insolvent... Given the fact that there may also be at least the possibility of...
These are some examples of the dangers of extreme heat just in the past week. As the climate grows hotter and extreme heat becomes our new normal, the summer will continue to bring reminders that high temperatures are a sinister threat.
And hot weather has already proven even more devastating in other countries. At least 30 people in Pakistan, more than 100 people in India, and more than 125 in Mexico have died due to heat waves this year. At the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, extremely hot weather played a role in the deaths of more than 1,300 people. According to the World Health Organization, heat stress is the leading cause of weather-related fatalities, and as global average temperatures rise, the risk is mounting.
It’s odd then that in so many aspects of our culture, we view severe heat as something that should be willingly embraced, bravely endured, blithely ignored, or in the case of some marginalized communities, entirely deserved.
Our books, movies, TV shows, common tropes, idioms, and social media often reinforce the idea that heat is something that — with enough mental acuity — we can overcome. But because of climate change, “pushing through” the heat is something we can no longer physically do. It’s just simply not possible in some parts of the world as temperatures rise past the point of practical survival.
We’ve already passed the point at which the millions of Americans who work outdoors in the summer, or who spend significant amounts of recreational time outside, can do so safely without regular access to shade and hydration — and increasingly even that isn’t enough. Yet ironically the more we rely on air conditioning and other human-made cooling systems for relief, the more we detach ourselves from the urgency of the issue.
It doesn’t help that heat itself, outside of an emergency like a wildfire, isn’t an immediate problem. It sneaks up on us, gradually inducing health problems over a number of hours, during which everything may seem fine — until it isn’t.
It’s worth examining our attitudes about heat: Where they come from, what kinds of built-in biases they might hold, and why it’s so hard to let go of the idea that failure to adapt to extreme heat is some kind of personal failing — even in a global heating crisis.
No one has to be miserably hot, and certainly no one has to die.
All our narratives about heat are about breaking through it. What if we can’t?
How did we get here? The delay in developing federal protections for workers exposed to the heat might be tied to the idea that if they couldn’t take it, it’s because they weren’t tough enough — a literal application of “if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen” and a deeply embedded cultural trope.
In fact, heat has been associated with physical and emotional endurance since the earliest modern novels — Don Quixote was very much toughing it out on his way to tilt at windmills. Narratively and thematically, heat typically represents hot tempers, madness and paranoia, and a growing tension and unease that often leads to aggression. It also co-exists with the concept of coolness — of “never letting them see you sweat.”
One character who did let us see him sweat did so in a movie that embodies the concept of calm under pressure — Paul Newman as Cool Hand Luke. The 1967 classic saw Newman nonchalantly dripping all over the celluloid while delivering an iconic performance as an unflappable prisoner serving a brutal term under grueling, sweltering conditions. Newman typified idealized masculinity that only grows stronger when put to the test — a test that in Cool Hand Luke includes enduring the heat.
The idea that oppressive heat is a phase that has to be borne until it passes — usually thanks to a climactic “break” in the weather like a rainstorm — exists in the narrative DNA of too many stories to count. Novels from One Hundred Years of Solitude to The Great Gatsby to Atonementuse heat as a structural and thematic device to intensify emotion and conflict, push things to a breaking point, and then generate catharsis.
This theme gets reified in cultural tropes as well — most prominently, the idea that increased temperatures lead to aggression and mental unwellness. The quintessential example of this — Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing, which was originally titled Heatwave — has at its narrative center a heat wave that slowly ratchets racial tensions throughout one Brooklyn neighborhood until they explode.
Why we reported this story
As rural Southerners, my family has always had a very casual yet ambivalent relationship with air conditioning; I inherited the attitude that I could generally tough out a hot summer without it.
Once I learned about the wet bulb threshold — the temperature at which the human body can no longer self-regulate against heat — I shifted toward not only increasing my own awareness of heat-related safety, but also trying to communicate the significance of wet bulb temperatures to family and friends. The more I tried — there’s a temperature at which you can’t sweat! That you can’t cool yourself down! And we’re hitting it with increasing frequency! — the more I sounded alarmist. My family tended to shrug off my pleas to stay indoors when the weather grew intense; their resistance toward using the AC was partly about saving energy, but also about that “just tough it out” mentality.
It’s an attitude I’ve noticed more often — in my own life and in my forays through social media — as heat waves have become the new norm, and I wanted to understand why and how this belief became so culturally embedded.
I also began to realize just how difficult it is to convey the urgency of hot weather as a health risk. Reporting this piece, I realized that the language we use to talk about climate change needs to evolve to address these concerns in a way that’s simple and direct. The sooner, the better. —Aja Romano
The notion that heat waves lead to violence typically gets mentioned in discussions and depictions of racial tensions, protests, riots, and other forms of civil and urban unrest, but reams of academic research also tie hot weather to increased car-honking, rioting, and domestic violence.
It’s important to stress, however, that correlation doesn’t equal causation. “It is not heat that triggers these incidences,” research scientist Adam Yeeles blogged in 2015. “There are economic, political, and cultural conflicts that bring people into the streets.” Yet it’s also true that extreme heat can seriously impact mental health and wellness, and all of this translates into the ongoing narrative that heat pushes people to physical, mental, and behavioral extremes — character tests to which they either succumb or overcome and push past.
This idea has unfortunately become a running theme in Hollywood. Erich von Stroheim’s silent film masterpiece Greed climaxes in Death Valley and was actually filmed in grueling temperature conditions reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the Mojave Desert for months as cast and crew battled heat exhaustion. A third of the location crew had to be discharged and one lead actor was hospitalized after filming wrapped. The film’s brutal production was a precursor to the method mentality that often valorizes intense set conditions — think Fitzcarraldo or Mad Max: Fury Road and the recent Furiosa, which all saw actors undergoing physically and psychologically intense productions with the aim of enhancing the emotional intensity and verisimilitude of their performances.
These types of performances tend to become mythologized in pop culture, and they contribute to the illusion that real people, if we’re tough enough, can habitually survive prolonged exposure to the elements.
The reality, however, is that such intense prolonged exertion can be dangerous; witness the 2019 death of rising film star Godfrey Gao while participating in a grueling running-themed reality show. The risks associated with such activities are only growing. But public attitudes aren’t changing. Instead, they’re arguably growing more detached from the problem of climate change as the mercury climbs.
We’ve insulated ourselves from the reality of climate change
One of the problems with communicating heat risks is that they’re often obscure.
The average person lacks the context that helps us realize how dangerous things are actually getting. A graph can show us things like incremental temperature increases, for example. But it doesn’t convey urgency.
“When you put these numbers on a graph and you connect them with a line, you see that the line tilts upwards,” Barak told Vox in an interview. “So this is global warming, but this doesn’t tell us almost anything about heat and about how people experience heat. Heat is differential. Women suffer differently from men, the old differently from the young, the rich differently from the poor. So everything that’s political about our encounter with heat gets thrown out of the picture when we reduce our language to ‘global warming.’”
One of the paradoxes of modern life is that as we insulate ourselves from the heat and retreat indoors, we also numb ourselves to the problem.
Barak points out that tools like air conditioning and refrigeration are powerful for combating the heat, but they also exacerbate the climate crisis by heating the outdoors, combusting fossil fuels, and leaking heat-trapping gasses. Additionally, they’ve ushered in a cultural unlearning of other older methods for dealing with hot temperatures, such as architecture that promotes passive cooling, or reclaiming and encouraging sweat as a natural method of temperature regulation.
Not only that, but our bodies may actually be growing less able to adapt; he notes that when people are raised in air conditioned environments, their ability to sweat diminishes. “We have created a world, a physical environment and a body that is the product of this unlearning and this maladaptation.”
“We’re adapting, but we’re oblivious to the price that we and future generations are and will be paying for these adaptations.”
He further stresses that there’s a physical limit to how much humans can adapt, pointing out the wet bulb temperature as a significant metric, since it alerts us to the upper limits of the human body’s ability to regulate itself.
The wet-bulb globe temperature, or WBGT, measures multiple elements associated with heat at once. The US military developed this measurement in the 1950s after learning the hard way that no amount of fortitude can keep soldiers standing when weather conditions drive bodies beyond their physiological limits. It accounts for air currents, exposure to direct sunlight, as well as its namesake, “wet bulb,” which involves placing a wet cloth over a thermometer to get a reading of when sweating can no longer cool us down.
The frustrating thing about the wet-bulb temperature is that its thoroughness makes it complicated to describe.
This means it’s hard to convey to the public the importance of having a measurement like this, one that can help us prepare for increasingly extreme outdoor conditions. That, in turn, makes it more difficult to standardize and normalize checking the wet-bulb temperature as often as we check “the weather.” (The National Weather Service has a prototype tool that can estimate WBGT near you.) Despite increasing media attention given to the phenomenon, with little government promotion of the measurement and little public education on heat risks, most people either aren’t paying attention or don’t understand what the wet-bulb’s significance is when they do.
Of course, the wet-bulb temperature works to help people understand when they should avoid exposing themselves to the sun. But that idea presupposes that we have a choice.
What happens when you don’t have a choice?
Too many people are compelled to endure dangerous heat
Despite the increasing danger heat exposure poses, many people face immense pressure to endure dangerous temperatures, if they have a choice at all.
In the US, about one-third of workers have jobs that require them to be outside, like farm laborers, construction crews, and delivery drivers, putting them at risk of heat-related illnesses during heat waves. Indoor workers like those in kitchens, warehouses, and assembly lines can also experience extremely hot temperatures. Workplace cultures can push employees to ignore their own discomfort to continue working past their limits. And when paychecks are on the line, workers can and do die on the job. In sectors like construction, heat illnesses and deaths have become all too routine.
Last month, a construction worker in Rhode Island collapsed on scaffolding on a hot day. His coworkers tried dousing him in cold water but he died in a hospital less than an hour later. High temperatures can also cause fatigue, impair judgment, and increase reaction times, leading to more injuries. A 2021 study found that in California, high temperatures cause about 20,000 additional workplace injuries per year.
Regulators are trying to make some changes and stepping up enforcement of worker protections. The US Department of Labor last month fined a labor contractor more than $30,000 for failing to protect a Florida farm worker who died from heat stroke while harvesting oranges during a winter heat wave.
While workers in theory have some choice in the jobs they take and momentum is building toward keeping them cool, the US also forces people to suffer dangerous levels of heat. At the end of 2022, the US incarcerated more than 1.2 million people, more than any other country in the world. America’s approach to penitentiaries hasn’t changed much since Cool Hand Luke: Many prisons today are cheaply designed, poorly maintained, and lack adequate ventilation. At least 44 states have prisons without air conditioning, including states like Texas that face some of the hottest temperatures in the country. According to the Texas Tribune, at least 41 people died in Texas prisons last year during heat waves. High temperatures likely played a role in the death of a prisoner in Illinois last month as well.
The heat doesn’t just afflict the prisoners; it also makes prisons a more dangerous work environment for corrections officers and other staffers.
Part of the challenge in improving conditions inside prisons and jails is the view that these facilities are supposed to be uncomfortable, and that people who are incarcerated somehow deserve to be hot.
“‘Prisons are supposed to suck’ — that’s a fundamental fallacy,” said John Fabricius, a legislative campaigner at Dream.org, a group advocating for prisoner rights and against mass incarceration. “Prisons are supposed to be about making the public safe. And if the prisons are actively executing policies that are decreasing public safety, then we have a problem.” In a blog post, Fabricius argued that severe heat exposure in prisons is forcing a reckoning between the stated goals of the criminal justice system and its actual implementation. Overheating prisons run contrary to the idea of these institutions as places for rehabilitation.
Janos Marton, chief advocacy officer at Dream.org working on criminal justice, explained that there is also a constitutional requirement to protect incarcerated people under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and when someone is in custody, the government must preserve their welfare and avoid suffering. Unbearably hot jail cells don’t just harm the people inside them but undermine society as a whole.
“Ninety-five percent of people who are sentenced to prisons are meant to come home,” Marton said. “So if you’re sentenced to three years on some sort of low-level felony and then you die in prison from this overheating crisis, then that’s the state’s complete failure to live up to their obligation.”
Some also argue people in jails and prisons don’t need cooling because plenty of people outside of prison sweat it out without the benefit of fans or air conditioning. But in a 2017 ruling requiring a Texas prison to lower temperatures in a notoriously hot prison unit, US District Judge Keith Ellison said he found this logic unpersuasive.
Ellison wrote that “there will be many among the public who will recount stories of having survived abodes in hot climates without the benefit of modern technology” but noted that “treatment of prisoners must necessarily evolve as society evolves.”
Poverty also leaves people little choice in dealing with hot weather. About half of the people who die during heat waves in a given year don’t have permanent housing. More than 650,000 people experience homelessness on a given night, with about 40 percent of them forced to stay in places not intended for habitation like cars or parks. With the recent Supreme Court ruling in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case, houseless people have even fewer rights to public spaces while cities can enact more punitive measures against them.
And with electricity rates rising, people on a tight budget may choose to go without air conditioning during some of the hottest months. Most states don’t have any rules that prevent a utility from cutting off power during a heat wave, so an unpaid bill could leave someone without the means to cool down when they need it most. Here again, the lack of resources we provide to this population to deal with the heat suggests a cultural victim-blaming — if they get too hot, it’s their own problem and if they can’t afford the “luxury” of cooling, too bad.
The way we talk about climate change needs to become more immediate
When we talk about advancing heat, small decisions can have ripple effects. Take a tiny but common tendency on the part of media outlets: To illustrate stories about heat waves and other climate crisis effects with photos of people relaxing at a beach or playing under a fountain — photos associated with leisure and relaxation rather than risk and caution.
“Not everybody has access to a pool, to an air conditioner, or even to a water hose,” Barak points out. “If your presentation of the heat wave is people at the pool or people who can take a break from work and go to the beach … you need to have the leisure, you need to have the career, the livelihood that allows you to cool off.”
Barak argues that far from being trivial, changing the way we think and talk about climate crisis “begins with these representations, visual and also lexical.” He argues that because our awareness of the climate crisis has been driven primarily by scientists, we’ve derived language from scientists, who tend to speak in terms of “humanity” as a species. Thus, we talk about climate change as a problem created by humanity.
The problem? The solution to the climate crisis is inherently political, but “humanity is not a political category,” Barak said. “Capitalists are more responsible than their employees, than the proletariat is for the climate crisis. The global north is more responsible than the global south. Men are more responsible than women. Different religions are more responsible than others.”
“If we do not allocate responsibility and blame and demand climate justice, then we remain in a nonpolitical language,” he said. He suggests, for example, naming heat waves the way we name hurricanes, in order to communicate their urgency — but proposes naming them after specific people whose business and political decisions have contributed directly to worsening the climate crisis. “Naming names,” he says, can be a huge step forward in creating political change.
Simultaneously, however, he stresses the need to internalize responsibility for change. He argues that we tend to think of the climate crisis “as something that comes from outside, as something that comes from out of space. And this is exactly the opposite of how we should really think of the problem — in which we are the meteorite, we are the aliens, we are the problem.”
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Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images
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It’s the first time a company has been formally accused of breaching the DSA under the EU’s so-called preliminary findings. X now has the opportunity to defend itself in response.
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Maybe AI can fix that. It sure looks like we’re about to find out. Microsoft, for instance, is making a big bet on Recall, an app that promises to use AI to collect, store, organize, and resurface everything you do and see on your computer. (Imagine just being able to ask your computer, “What was that article about bees I read the other day? What was the timeline it mentioned?”) At this year’s Google I/O, the most impressive AI...
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Amazon isn’t commenting on how many business bots it actually sold since the November 2023 launch, but the company’s VP of hardware engineering, Lindo St. Angel, says he’s “increasingly convinced the progress we’re making in home robotics is where we should focus our resources.” We’re sharing his full internal memo below.
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Whether intentional or not, the process for tech companies to fall to the process of enshittification seems to be a very real trend. The term, coined by Cory Doctorow, describes the process by which once good and useful technology platforms devolve to become worse and less useful as the owners of those platforms move on from creating a great user experience and turn instead towards aiming purely at profitability. This typically involves injecting advertisements anywhere possible, or altering useful features via firmware updates, or cutting cost by axing development and support teams. All of this leads to platforms pissing customers off to the point of un-adoption.
And that brings us to Roku. Roku, over recent months, appears to be fully engulfed in the process of enshittification. The platform recently began the process of layering advertisements foisted on customers where there once were none. They’re legal and communications teams are clearly not thinking things through when they pull stuff like sending out a new ToS requirement for already purchased devices with a threat to brick them if users don’t agree.
Reports on Roku’s community forums and on Reddit find owners of TCL HDTVs, on which Roku is a built-in OS, experiencing “motion smoothing” without having turned it on after updating to Roku OS 13. Some people are reporting that their TV never offered “Action Smoothing” before, but it is now displaying the results with no way to turn it off. Neither the TV’s general settings, nor the specific settings available while content is playing, offer a way to turn it off, according to some users.
When it works, a signal looks more fluid and, as the name implies, smooth. When it is left on and a more traditional signal at 24 or 30 frames per second is processed, it works somewhat too well. Shows and films look awkwardly realistic, essentially lacking the motion blur and softer movement to which we’re accustomed. Everything looks like a soap opera or like you’re watching a behind-the-scenes smartphone video of your show. It’s so persistent an issue, and often buried in a TV’s settings, that Tom Cruise did a whole PSA about it back in 2018.
If you’ve ever played around with your TVs image settings, you know all about this sort of thing. Motion blurring may have its uses, but it tends to come up as a topic when people are watching content that has fast movement on the screen, particularly with watching sports. The viewing experience suddenly looks janky, like you’re watching the screen pan in a way that makes everything look slightly fake by, ironically, looking too real compared with the rest of the content.
It can be a major frustration for those looking for the best viewing experience. So suddenly pushing out an update that locks in customers to this option they may not want is, well, certainly a choice. It would be as though you couldn’t adjust the image brightness or color scheme settings to make it the best experience for your particular device in your particular home.
Now, I have no doubt that this was done in error and that Roku will put in a fix for this. But that isn’t really the point. Roku is going down a road that often leads to ruin, simply because it’s paying less attention to the experience of its customers and instead focusing only inward.
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