Transforming Workplace Experiences with Logitech + Microsoft - Six Five Media Webcast

How are Microsoft and Logitech actually making the everyday meeting notably better?

Host Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director, Enterprise Applications at The Futurum Group, is joined by Rishi Kumar, Director of Alliances & Go-to-Market, B2B Business Group at Logitech and Sandhya Rao, Principal Group Product Manager, Teams Core AI at Microsoft.

Tune in as they discuss announcements from Microsoft Build and Logitech, including the integration of Microsoft Copilot within Teams, new features from Logitech, and how both vendors are enabling customers to bring their own devices (BYOD) while ensuring an exceptional meeting experience.

Key takeaways include:

🔹Copilot's Power in Teams Rooms: Explore the latest announcements enabling Microsoft Copilot within Teams Rooms, including speaker recognition, attribution, and the impact of Team Copilot.

🔹Logitech's Enhanced Meeting Intelligence: Learn how Logitech is bringing choice and flexibility to Teams Rooms (Windows and Android), alongside cutting-edge features like IntelliFrame, to optimize meeting experiences.

🔹Seamless BYOD Experiences: Understand Microsoft's and Logitech's strategic initiatives around "Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD) to meeting rooms, ensuring high-quality experiences with features like Shared Display mode and advanced IT capabilities.

🔹The Future of Meeting Technology: Gain insights into how these innovations—from advanced AI agents like Copilot in BYOD settings to intelligent framing—are setting new standards for collaboration and user experience.

Learn more at Logitech and Microsoft.

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Keith Kirkpatrick: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Six Five Media Webcast. I'm Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director with The Futurum Group. Today, we're here to talk about the latest innovations from Microsoft and Logitech in the Teams Rooms space. Joining me here today are Sandhya Rao, Microsoft's head of product for Microsoft Teams, personal AI and shared space devices. And Rishi Kumar, Logitech's director of alliances and go-to-market. It's great to have both of you here today.

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Sandhya Rao: Thank you.

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Rishi Kumar: Thanks for having us.

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Keith Kirkpatrick: We just wrapped up Microsoft Build and Logitech's spring event earlier this week. I would really like to hear what was some of the real important announcements that we had coming out of the event related to Co-Pilot, and of course, all of Logitech's solutions? 

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Sandhya Rao: So, in terms of the big announcement, it was around Team Co-Pilot. I think maybe people are sort of wondering what that is. Hopefully by now, you've used personal Co-Pilot, which is a really great feature within Teams. I use it every day. Whether it's to just ask a question, or find a file, or if I've missed a meeting, get a recap, a quick summary of what happened. I also really like to use the one where, when you're late to meetings, to get a recap of what has been said already. That's always really helpful. That's already out there.

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What was announced this week is what is called Team Co-Pilot. Team Co-Pilot is really exciting because it means that we get a Co-Pilot when we're in a team, essentially. When we're meeting, we can have a Co-Pilot there with us, who can share with us, "Hey, here's the agenda for the meeting." Or, "Let me take notes for this meeting. I can also make sure that I capture the action items and assign them to people. Then later on, remind them that “Hey, you've got these assignments that are due next week that you signed up for," which is what I always forget. Yeah, I raise my hand a lot and then it's like, "Oh, I'm the one who signed up for that?" Co-Pilot is there to help keep us on track in the meeting and do a lot of the work of maybe what the traditional note-taker would do instead. That's really exciting.

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I think the added piece where I think it's really exciting to be working with folks like Logitech is around how that's going to manifest in a Teams Room. Within the Teams Room, you'll effectively be able to walk in and say, "Hey, we want a Co-Pilot in this meeting." Whether that meeting is with remote participants or just locally in the room, that Co-Pilot can take notes, can start to capture all of the things that are being discussed. Then you can leverage all those assets afterwards, whether you're creating a PowerPoint or a Word doc, or you need a summary to share out to your executives or whatnot. That's really exciting to be able to work with our partners on.

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Keith Kirkpatrick: Rishi, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why customers should consider Logitech when it comes to using Co-Pilot in Teams rooms?

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Rishi Kumar: Yes, of course. I’ll start off by saying that we have this really deep partnership with Microsoft, it’s been a great journey, specifically the context of the Teams Rooms space. We’ve worked with Microsoft well over 8 years, we were the first partner to launch a Skype Room systems, and since then, of course, we’ve been busy launching a very diverse portfolio of Teams Rooms solutions across Teams Rooms on Windows and Android.  Now, coming back to Co-Pilott, why would you choose Logitech?  This deep partnership extends to several activities, one of which is very robust joined testing and QA. So, there’s this new feature coming to Teams Rooms and Windows called “Intelligent Speaker” for all rooms and devices. In fact, it is in public preview. And what that does is it makes Co-Pilot really useful in the context of Meeting Room because now Co-Pilot will know specifically who said what in a meeting room. We feel very confident that this feature works really well across our entire portfolio of Teams Rooms on Windows solutions. 

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Now, in addition to that, we’ve recently announced a new technology called “RightSound 2”.  Essentially, what that comprises of is a number of AI algorithms that run on the edge on our devices, our video bars, et cetera, and essentially it reduces noise in the meeting room, it reduces reverb, all of these sounds bouncing off hard surfaces. That in conjunction with these 6 beam-forming mics that we have across our portfolio of video bars, ensures that the audio input that’s essentially going towards the cloud technology that Microsoft has to so the speaker recognition attribution is of high quality.  So, you have RightSound 2 and that’s really helping the situation.  In addition, I mentioned that we have a robust portfolio across Windows and Android, this feature Intelligent Speaker for all rooms and devices is coming to Windows first. 

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If you invest in Logitech, you can rest assured that all of our video bars can be deployed in both Windows and Android mode. So you have a choice upfront on how to deploy, and your needs might change and you can certainly shift the deployment mode without having to reinvest in that video bar.  So that’s a really good investment for our customers. And then lastly, we have also announced that all of our video bars will be upgraded to Android 12, so that naturally just extends the life of all of these video bars.  So, lots of good reasons for customers to choose Logitech, particularly as they start deploying Co-Pilot and start integrating that into their workflow, specifically in the context, as well, of Teams Rooms.

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Keith Kirkpatrick: Absolutely. Sandhya, I don't know if you want to amplify anything that Rishi was talking about here briefly?

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Sandhya Rao: Today, you can walk into any meeting, if that meeting is being recorded, it will pick up the transcript of the people in the room. Now just to continue with that flow, today you can query the Co-Pilot and it'll say, "These were the action items," and whatnot. Today what it does is its everybody in the room sounds the same unless you have an intelligent speaker. What's in public preview right now, and it's going to be generally available by the end of June on Teams Rooms on Windows, is that when you walk into the room, it will identify different speakers. It'll say, "Speaker 1 said this, Speaker 2 said this, Speaker 3 said this." That's going to make the Co-Pilot even better.

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In addition, if people have enrolled prior to the meeting, so you can go enroll your voice in Teams, then it's going to actually be able to say, "Rishi said this, or Sandhya said this," in the room. All of that is coming by the end of June to Teams Room on Windows. You'll see that on the Logitech devices. Then we'll subsequently introduce that to Android over the subsequent months. That's all great goodness. Then what was announced at Build is the next level of Co-Pilot. Which is this concept of the Team Co-Pilot, where now not only are you looking at Team Recap in Co-Pilot after the meeting, but now it's actually helping you while you're in the meeting. Whether you're in a meeting on your personal device or you're in a group setting using a Teams Room, you're going to get that Team Co-Pilot experience, which is really exciting.

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Keith Kirkpatrick: Yeah. All of this sounds really exciting and really seems to enable a much more rich and enhanced meeting experience, whether you're there live or whether you've missed the meeting because you were probably double booked or something like that. Rishi, I wonder if we could just briefly touch on another topic related to AI, which is IntelliFrame. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that is and why Logitech is implementing this feature?

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Rishi Kumar: So, IntelliFrame, generically intelligent framing, is essentially a technology which where we use cameras in the meeting room and AI to better frame individual participants that’s typically putting each participant in their own tile to provide a more engaging experience for most users and essentially promoting meeting equity. Now, Logitech has a version of intelligent framing which we call “RightSight 2” and there are various versions of that, it has speaker view, it has grid view.  Speaker view, for instance, is focusing on the person who is speaking. Grid view essentially takes up to 4 active speakers and puts them on a grid while also providing a full view of the room so you know what’s going on, in the wider, sort of, setting within the room, where there may be some non-speakers, et cetera. 

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Now, all of this enables IntellliFrame which is a MicroSoft specific feature within Teams Rooms. And our Rally Bars use that approach, they use Right Sight 2 grid view, and then we have a center of room camera called “Sight”.  And Sight, when combined with a front of room camera, which could be a Rally Bar or Rally Bar Mini, has been certified as an intelligent camera.  So that’s the first combination of a center of room and a front of room camera to be certified as an intelligent camera. And what that does also is delivers up to four active speakers together.  Today we are using an approach that MicroSoft does define as composite view, which is sending singular frame along with an optional full view of the room. What we’ve announced is that we are going to switch to the multi-stream approach, that is sending over a single stream for each active speaker in the room. And we should have that available later in the year. 

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The last thing I will add with regard to IntelliFrame is that we have a technology called “SmartSwitching”. So what that does is that it uses the best perspective of the center of room camera and the front of room camera. So imagine that you are sitting in one of these rooms that has the Logitech Sight sitting in the center of the room and a Rally Bar sitting in the front of the room. When you are facing the display, maybe when you are addressing a remote participant, the front of room camera will capture you and send that feed over. However, maybe you are speaking across the table to someone sitting opposite of you, at that time Sight will capture your image head on. So this feature is called SmartSwitching so depending on where you are looking in the room, the right camera will pick you up and send that feed back to the Teams Room software.      

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Keith Kirkpatrick: That sounds great. It sounds like a lot of that technology really is helping to improve engagement with each participant in the meeting so they're not ... If they're there, if they're actually focusing on what the speaker is saying or speakers are saying, so they're not drifting off, checking email or doing what quite honestly a lot of us are guilty of during these meetings. Sandhya, I was wondering if you could talk about something else here, which is Microsoft's initiatives around “bring your own device.” What is that and why is that important?

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Sandhya Rao: Yeah, absolutely. We know that there's a lot of shared spaces out there, millions, and people are coming back to work. Many of the shared spaces have Teams Rooms, which is great. In the process of deploying Teams Rooms everywhere, we really want to essentially meet the customers where they are. We know that customers don't have unlimited budgets. Some of those rooms that are in these shared spaces just don't have the budget to have a full-fledged Teams Room right now.

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What we're developing is this concept of bring your own device rooms. What that means is how do we actually make meetings great, even in the rooms where there aren't Teams Rooms? Because a lot of times, as you know, meetings are still hybrid. There's some people coming into work and some people that are still remote. You're still likely going to have to do a video conferencing set up, but the bring your own device rooms probably just are off of your laptop. 

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What we've done there is we've optimized the end user experience by leveraging things like a display that's in the room and being able to hook into that display, and give a better experience for people in the room. Also, that host who's hooking in has a little more privacy so they're not screen sharing all of the things on their laptop. They're only screen-sharing the meeting which is a shared entity. We want to bring that to life. Then I think the other big piece to bring your own device, one side is the end user experience. The other piece is the IT admin experience.

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Because at the end of the day, the IT admin still needs to make sure that video conferencing is working great in those rooms. Today, they really don't have a lot of insight as to what's going on there. What we want to do is be able to leverage the peripherals in the room, whether it's a camera, or a speaker, or a display and be able to actually let the IT admin know, "Hey, somebody came into this room. People are using this room. This is how long they're using it," and start to give them some insights as to what's going on there. That'll not only help them manage workflows and the people that are coming into the office, but it'll also help to provide them with a roadmap to Teams Rooms.

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Once they start understanding what's happening in these BYOD rooms, then they can start to say, "Okay, well these are the ones that are being used the most. These are the ones where I want to actually prioritize getting them upgraded to a Teams Room." Giving them that insight so that they're not blindly trying to guess at okay, where do I actually make my next investment?

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Keith Kirkpatrick: Right. Providing more visibility into utilization and a path forward for future investment.

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Sandhya Rao: Yeah, that's right.

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Keith Kirkpatrick: Great. Rishi, maybe you could talk a little bit about what Logitech is doing around BYOD?

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Rishi Kumar: Logitech has recently launched a product that’s called Meetup 2, which is a follow up to one of our best selling video bars, the original Meetup. Which, incidentally, we also announced that the original Meetup has sold over a million devices so that was quite the milestone, it’s had a great run. Of course, we will continue to sell that. But what you get with the new Meetup, which is the Meetup 2 is a feature called Single Cable BYOD. So imagine a room where you are using BYOD, typically you are gonna have a video bar and a display and you are gonna bring in your laptop.  You are going to have two cables: you are going to have a USB cable coming in from the video bar that’s gonna deliver the video and the audio, and then of course you have to connect the HDMI from the display. 

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Now in this case, the display connects to Meetup 2 and you have a single USBC cable coming from the Meetup 2. Now combine that with the features that Sandhya referred to, you know for end users there is the shared display mode which is great. It takes your video gallery and puts it at the front of the room while retaining all your other windows where you might want to keep those private and keep those on your laptop. Also, the auto numeration that happens, it picks the right camera, speaker, all of that good stuff. So you combine single cable BYOD mode with all of those features it’s now becoming a really compelling user experience for end users. And then, of course, Sandhya mentioned that there are good benefits for IT as well, they are really beginning to understand utilization of these rooms and that’s where this becomes a really important stepping stone for a native Teams Rooms experience. 

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And that’s where the Meetup 2 shines because it can also run as a Teams Rooms on Windows. All you have to use is a certified PC that’s provided by Logitech, add that to the room. So I think this is, in terms of a product that helps customers where they are in their journey, which could be BYOD, and helps them better utilize it, and better realize the features of Teams from Windows, I think Meetup 2 is going to do a really good job. And then let’s not forget, by the BYOD setting, you are still on your laptop so you have access to Co-Pilot when you are using Teams, so that can really help you. And then of course, if you are in a BYOD setting with a few more users, I think there is some good stuff coming there with regard to Co-Pilot. In fact, Sandhya if you wouldn’t mind sharing what we can expect from Co-Pilot and BYOD that would be great.     

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Sandhya Rao: Yeah, sure. Again, we want to make sure that you can use Co-Pilot everywhere. As we continue our BYOD journey, we want to bring that concept of separating out different speakers into Speaker 1, Speaker 2, as well as actually being able to identify them even when you're in a BYOD room running off your laptop. That's something that we want to bring there as well for sure.

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Keith Kirkpatrick: Well, this is really great. It sounds like there were a lot of great innovations for Teams Rooms customers, from Co-Pilot, to IntelliFrame, to BYOD. Really, all of this seems like it is about driving improved meeting experiences, supporting meeting attendee equity, improving the efficiency and productivity of folks in these meetings, and ultimately creating a more connected and collaborative work experience. I would like to thank Sandhya and Rishi for joining me here on The Six Five Media Webcast. Be sure to like and subscribe on the platform of your choice. We'll see you all again very soon. Thank you both for joining me today

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