Microsoft has announced (via Thurrott) a slew of updates coming to its Office mobile apps available with Microsoft 365, including for Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft Lens, which according to the company, they will “help people bring balance to their day.”
The new improvements range from organizing and transforming things like documents, photos, and videos into digital assets to more secure ways to protect sensitive information.
As part of the Microsoft Teams changes, the app is expected to get user-created video content collaboration, enhanced with the Microsoft Lens (formerly Office Lens) scanning technology. Also, Cortana features in Teams will soon be expanding to English in Australia, Canada, U.K., and India (in addition to English for the United States).
Cortana in Teams lets you use commands to make a call, join a meeting, send chat messages, share files, search, and more.
In the Outlook app for iOS, Microsoft is working on adding conversational AI technology with Cortana bringing “voice forward assistive experiences that aim to provide helpful ways of organizing your daily life.”
Across Outlook, Teams, and Office, the software giant is building new Microsoft Search capabilities. For example, the service will add support for natural language queries (United States), and in Office for Android, you can now use Microsoft Search to find files using natural language.
Finally, the company is also adding micro-tasking shortcuts to many of its apps to allow users to get small common tasks done faster, such as a quick way to create a form or poll in Office or Teams, view daily weather forecast and integration with Bing web-view in Outlook, and in iOS, there will be a Microsoft To-Do widget for a quick view and access to your tasks.
The coupons feature is also coming to the mobile version of Microsoft Edge to help you save money when shopping on your phone. You will also get the ability to add shortcuts for files you shared in OneDrive, snapping Android phone apps on Windows 10, and much more.
Although the company is not sharing the exact release date, the new features outlined above (and many more) are expected to start rolling out in the coming weeks.
