Microsoft is adding new AI-based capabilities to Polls in Teams meetings

Microsoft Teams is slated to get a host of new capabilities to improve the new built-in Polls feature in meetings, according to an update to the Microsoft 365 roadmap (via Neowin). These updates have been designed to enhance the Teams meeting experience and make virtual meetings more productive and engaging.

First off, the company is planning to introduce some general improvements based on user feedback. With this update, Polls in Teams Meetings will be adding support for external guests and an optimized mobile experience.

The AI-based poll question suggestion is another change coming soon to Teams meetings. This means that Microsoft Teams will leverage the Forms intelligence service’s power to suggest polls to users automatically. The feature will take into account the purpose of the meeting and the user’s historical poll data to offer poll suggestions.

Other upgrades concern making suggestions for the poll options. This should enable users to quickly create surveys to gather instant feedback on a particular idea during discussions. In addition, a new “open text” question type will let meeting organizers collect open-ended information from attendees either before, during, or after the meeting.

Microsoft is bringing the ability for poll creators to select one or more correct answers for multiple-choice questions. The Results card and the Forms site will display this correct answer to the participants after the voting session.

Lastly, Microsoft Teams will make it easier for the organizers to manage the polls data collected during Teams meetings. A new word cloud data insight feature will provide meeting hosts a quick overview of the most commonly used text phrases used by poll respondents.

Furthermore, if a user has created a poll, the app will automatically generate a summary report after a meeting has ended. This report will be shared with the meeting organizer, presenters, and teachers.

Microsoft Teams introduced the polling capability into Teams meetings back in November 2020. The roadmap listing indicates that most of these features will begin rolling out in March, and we hope to see these announcements at the Ignite 2021 conference next week. However, both the Correct Answer choice and word cloud data insight features are scheduled to launch in April this year.