Welcome to episode 393 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live from Microsoft Ignite 2024. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben is joined on the show by Alex Mooney from Logitech. The 2 of them discuss the integration of technology into meetings. They start out the discussion by talking about AI for transcribing in person
meetings, highlighting some of their benefits. And then from there, shift into discussion around various meeting room systems for Microsoft Teams. They discuss some of the offerings from Logitech, including the Rally Bar Huddle, Rally Bar Mini, and Rally Bar, and how they are certified for both Microsoft Teams on Android and Windows in order to work in different scenarios for building out your Microsoft Teams room systems. So we're sitting here at Ignite, another interview.
So it's been a good show. It's day what day is it? Day 2 or 3 now? 2? 3. I I think day 3? Messed up with Monday. It's Thursday. It is day 3. Yes. So I'm sitting here with Alex from Logitech. So we're gonna talk, like, Teams, Teams Room Devices, Teams Premium, maybe some Copilot because that's what everybody talks about at Ignite. Copilot. Copilot. Copilot. Yeah. Exactly. So I need to go ahead and introduce yourself, Alex. Tell us a little bit about you, what you
do, all that. Thanks, Ben. Yeah. So I'm Alex Mooney. I work at Logitech in our alliances group, which is basically just means that I get to do all the fun stuff of managing our partnership with Microsoft. So product development, certifications, everything in that kind of realm, and then how we deliver these products to our customers. Okay. Very cool. So you're gonna tell us all the stuff that Logitech's working on. Right? Yeah. All the things. All the things. Excuse
me. This podcast, to listen to this episode, you have to sign the NDA. No. So I'm curious, Alex. Like, I know we were talking a little bit about some of the devices, and we'll probably get into that a little bit later. But more from, like, a Windows devices. You guys do a bunch. Like, I've used Logitech devices forever. You have mice. You have keyboards. You have meeting room devices. You have headsets.
So with that, I'm you see a lot of different aspects of more how people are working, whether it's working on Windows with peripherals, Teams meetings. Like, what have you I guess, maybe even how have you seen the industry change, or how are do you see people working recently as they incorporate your devices into their day to day workflow? Yeah. It's fine. Logitech, I guess, for the last 40 years, we have been creating peripherals to try to create human interaction with software and tools,
produced by Microsoft and others. And so whether it's a keyboard, a mouse, a webcam, a headset, we've been in this space for a long time. We only just recently in the last, I'd say, 12 years, got into doing meeting room technology. Okay. And just in that time, we've been able to kind of skyrocket into now the number one position as an OEM creating Microsoft Teams Rooms, but more more largely market share wise with just creation of video
conferencing products around the world. And I think the reason why is because during that time frame, people's requirements shifted from these massive codecs that were complicated, $200,000 rooms plus, and we just wanted to make video and audio ubiquitous across all the rooms. We wanted to make it available to all the users in the organization. So we took the approach of saying, hey. We're gonna use USB. We're gonna use open standards. No one was doing it. People looked at us like we were crazy.
Why is Logitech making a camera? Don't do that. But it's fun. And I think that's why we saw this kind of seismic shift. After 2020, we we already knew everyone's gonna go work from home. Everyone's gonna be remote, and everyone's gonna need ways to connect whether it's with super high quality audio or video or other things. They're gonna need ways to connect with their coworkers and to keep their workflows going. So we already knew that, but it
just accelerated all these trends. It brought them in 8, 10 10 years in terms of the adoption. So I think right now, we're all experiencing the back end of that. Like, it's just everyone does video. If I get through a single day without saying, I'm you're on mute, it's it's a it's a good day. But, yeah, that's where we are. And I think there's a there's a big trend right now within Microsoft Teams Rooms. So saying, do I want to have rooms deployed on Windows or
on Android? That's a hot topic right now. I think looking deeper into the management stacks is a hot topic. What size of room should we deploy? Maybe we don't need so many boardrooms. We can do, like, Huddl rooms, things like that. So there's a lot of those questions out. BYOD, how does AI fit into this ecosystem? Like, Copilot is everywhere, but Yep. Okay. But how do I incorporate that into my meeting practice? I think that's the trend of where we're seeing everyone go. Okay. So what kind of
trends have you seen? We'll just dive right into meetings because that one's a popular one with Copilot. Right? Is Yeah. Copilot, Teams Premium, meeting transcriptions, what kind of trends have you seen from the AI space, Copilot, as well as meetings, meeting rooms Yeah. That type of space? So the I think one of the most compelling use cases early on for Copilot is the meeting summaries
and so forth. Because just in terms of early adoption, like, I haven't quite figured out how to incorporate Copilot into my mainstream workflows in Office and PowerPoint, so forth. Outlook, this is obvious. Help me rephrase this this email, summarize what I'm reading, so forth like that. Yep. These are very early stage adoptions. So they're easy for users to wrap their minds around. But one of the most immediate places where you get the benefit of the time saving is actually
in the meeting room. So it's, I joined late, catch me up, or I didn't join the meeting at all, give me the summary and and so forth. What were the action items? Can we make some notes? These kinds of things. That I think has been really, really cool. One thing that we've been trying to really focus on is, okay, this is great. We have this amazing technology from Microsoft. How do we help users get the most out of that? And it actually starts with
super high quality audio capture. So the more that we can work with our customers to make sure that the audio is pristine, that means that the transcript is accurate. And when you have an accurate transcript, Copilot gives you accurate insights. So it starts all the way back with some of our just basic AV principles, and then making sure that these things are happening. So trend wise, I think that we're seeing a lot of people trying to look into, do I wanna turn in turn on recognition?
Okay. Speaker recognition and so forth, which is where the in Teams room, the Teams room will actually identify the various users sitting around the table. So since Alex is saying this, Ben's saying that Yep. Versus it's just Teams user, Teams user. Right. That's an important one. It takes a lot of data data governance. Like, how do I want to, you know, update my privacy policies to allow this? There's a a moment there that you have to make some key
decisions as an organization. But I think fundamentally, just let's make sure that we have really, really, really good audio. Well and that's an interesting one because people have known that going back in other technologies. Like, you look at business intelligence. Right? That's been around for
a while now. And I remember when business intelligence was first catching on, that was a big thing as people were like, well, if I put garbage data into business intelligence, I'm not gonna get the reports, the metrics out of it that maybe I'm looking for. And now it sounds like you've seen the same thing as for a long time, and I would say even today, I get in a lot of meetings, and people don't necessarily
care about their audio. They're using, like, their laptop speaker with the lid closed in a clamshell then. That audio quality isn't necessarily there, and that's not something that I know I don't know that I've necessarily thought about that either is, what if you want good transcripts, you want good summaries, really focusing on the input. The AI model can only do so much based on the quality of data going into it. And some of it's user
training. Don't talk over each other in a meeting because then the transcription has a hard time keeping up with who's saying what in the meeting room. So some of it is just user behavioral training, but also, a lot of it is, yeah, you just need to know what the person said. And not everyone speaks as loud. Some people speak softer. There's all sorts of different ranges
of vocal qualities and so forth. And so making sure that you have a super high quality audio pickup for every seat in the room is a critical component to getting the most out of the AI investment because otherwise, you're gonna miss somebody's valuable input. And if you've missed just one voice out of 10 at a meeting room, well, your transcription is now not accurate. So all the insights you gain are actually missing the full picture. So
I think that's a a key element. We're trying really hard to make sure we're doing this. So we've got this thing called right site 2. Okay. Right sound 2. Okay. This is our AI built into our meeting room technology that improves the, auto framing for site. So the visuals Oh, interesting. Okay. And the audio performance for right sound. And so it's really cool. We're doing a lot of AI algorithms to remove unwanted sounds, typing, bag crinkling, like potato chips or whatever. How
about somebody eating an apple? That's what I'm on. I'm like, I can have meetings and somebody's like, chomps into an apple, and I'm like, okay. Come on. Really? Right by the mic pod too. It's always. Exactly. Yeah. So so we are looking for voices, and then we're looking for commonly unwanted sounds. So it's a little more than just like a basic noise reduction, which is like an audio gating. So it's a lot smarter than
that. And we're removing unwanted sounds, and then making sure that every voice in the room is auto leveled. Got it. Quiet speakers, loud speakers, all come across at approximately the same volume. And that come coupled with obviously things like echo cancellation, reverberation reduction, just to make sure you get a really nice clean capture. Right. It makes a
a really nice front end audio experience. Much better than what people might hear on this given the environment we're sitting in and that we're not recording this with, that type of stuff. But On on a trade show floor. Right. On a trade show floor. Fortunately, for this, we get the post processing, where a lot of meetings, you're not you don't have the advantage of post post processing the audio. So it's doing, like, real time AI audio processing
of all these different voices. Yeah. We jokingly say we want video to be better than being there. So we we want the remote experience to be better than the in person experience. Now this is obviously an ambitious concept. But the point is is that if you were, like, say, watching a sporting event, you're watching and every camera that you saw on the screen was just the headshot of the person running around, you miss all the context. It's like,
okay. This is cool. I can see everyone's face, but I don't actually know what's going on. Yeah. So what you really want is someone to intelligently switch the camera views for you so you always see the action. And when you're listening to the audio, you don't wanna listen to everything. You really want something to curate the audio and make sure that it's really, really clean. All the noises are removed. So that's what we're trying to bake in with AI into all of our products.
That's where Right Sight and Right Sound come in. Right Sight with things like Logitech Sight in the center of table doing smart switching. It does this cool thing where it takes all the camera lenses in the room, and then it intelligently switches the view of you in the gallery based on your head position. So if you turn your head and you look at the front of room and you're addressing the far end user, they see you
looking at them. But if I then turn across the table to talk to someone that's collaborating in the room, we'll switch the view to the center of table camera, see all the remote experience, you always see the person's face. Got it. So you're able to we'll move around this around a minute with your products. You're able to put multiple
cameras in the room. So if you have, like, the camera under the screen in the front, but then a camera on the table or cameras placed around the room, they can all work together Yeah. To really intelligently give you the best. You get, like, an automated an AI cameraman Exactly. In the room. Exactly. Yeah. So let's use an example of a rally bar. It's a really common all in one video bar. We would put that under the display. It's got speakers, microphones, and the camera all built into it.
And it's 22 lenses, 2 cameras on board, a wide angle camera, and then one that can zoom in and focus. So when you have 2 there, that's great. You're gonna cover this big room. But what if my room is say 15 seats on a really long table, like a bowling alley? Yep. The lens can only see from the front of the table. So if somebody leans forward, they're blocking all the people behind them. Right. You can't see them. And so what we really want is to add additional cameras
down the table. That's where Logitech site comes in. Okay. So now you have this center of table camera. It can see everyone around the table's faces and you have the front of room, but now you need something to intelligently direct and and switch which camera view is being shown so the foreign user doesn't have to do it themselves. And that's where the AI comes in. We compare all the views of Ben in the gallery, and we say, this is the best picture. Ben, show
that to the foreign user. We don't want the one that's looking in his ear as he turns and okay. Yeah. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligink is here to help. Much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, Intelligent helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment because that's their expertise.
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Remember, Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud, so you focus on your business. So another thing you mentioned earlier was Teams Room on Android and Teams Room on Windows. And I know this is something that we were talking about, the actually, the other day. I was here asking you some questions about it because sometimes the functionality differs between those two platforms. There's pros and cons probably
to each one. What are some of those things that you've seen in helping people pick between, maybe I'm okay with Teams Room on Android or I want Teams Rooms on Android, versus when should I maybe start thinking about Teams Room on Windows because of how those 2 kinda compare or contrast or have different advantages and such? This is a question that we get from customers all the time that are people that are just trying to figure out, I've gotta manage a 1,000 rooms. Which management
ecosystem do I want? I think that's really what it boils down to, Windows versus Android. It comes down to the management ecosystem. Okay. And some of the feature discrepancies between the two platforms. Microsoft did a a nice article not too long ago that kind of shared their position on where the feature development happens and so forth. So I think people know Windows is gonna be the platform you want to use for your Microsoft Teams room if you're gonna use things like AI and so
forth like that. If you want intelligent speaker recognition where you would have, say, a rally bar in the room, but as different users in the room speak, it identifies them as their name instead of just So, like, conference room 1 or yeah. Yeah. You're gonna get those features on Windows first. This is where a lot of the development happens. Android is super simple to deploy and manage. It's built into the bars, and so you don't have
a separate PC to manage. So a lot of companies that are coming out of environments where they're used to managing, they have their own AVVLANs and so forth. They're used to the appliance Yeah. Model of an AV component. They like the Android experience because it's just easy, simple device, all in one. Attach my license, and I'm good to go. So it fundamentally just comes down to where does your particular capabilities and your team lie? Where what are you more
comfortable managing? Windows PCs or Android devices? And then from there, what are the specific needs in each room that you may need? If you want all the AI, go with Windows. If you like simplicity for maybe smaller spaces and stuff, Android's a great option for that. Logitech doesn't necessarily want to tell our users which ones they need to use because it's it's a very unique decision for every organization. Everybody's needs are
different. And so what we do, which I think we do uniquely amongst OEMs, is we dual certify all of our products for both Windows and Android. So that same rally bar that has Android built in Yep. You plug it in with a USB to a PC, and now it's a certified Teams Rooms on Windows device as well. So you have that kind of option. Got it. And this is what you had to explain this to me
like a few times. I was trying to wrap my head around it the other day, where like, Teams Room on Android is technically running on the devices. So if you pick up a Logitech device, one of the Teams Room devices, put it on the wall, hang it on the TV, plug it into a network cable, you can be up and going, running, we'll say that quickly. There's the licensing and stuff to think about as well, but then you're gonna be running Teams Room on Android. Right. Because Android is what the OS built
into all your operating systems. And if you want Teams Room on Windows, you do need to have another device, some PC device, mini PC, full blown computer. I'm assuming people pulling a laptop into the room and plugging it in, any of those, and then it just automatically switches to Teams Room on Windows? Yes. There's 3 categories. We'll say it's BYOD, meaning I brought my laptop in, I plug it into the room, and my laptop hosts the meeting. Okay. The second category is I
have a native Teams room. It's got a Teams room pro license attached, and I've made the decision to go with Teams rooms on Android for the management ecosystem. In which case, the compute that's that's hosting the meeting is actually built into the bar on a chipset that's already integrated into the bar. And that's the one running Android Right. For everything. And then there's Teams Rooms on
Windows. If you chose to have a native Teams Room but running on a Windows PC, you have the Windows PC in the room connected to the bar, and the Windows PC is the one that's hosting the call and providing those streams back to Microsoft in the cloud. So it really just depends on where does the Teams client that's hosting the call live. Got it. Do you dare get into licensing? Like, do you talk about licensing when it comes? Because I know that's another topic.
I have some Teams Room devices at home. I won't say which ones because they're a competitor. We can fix that. We can fix that? Okay. Good to hear. And then I can get some experience with those. But I know some of the licensing has changed to around Teams Room devices and how you think about even which licenses you may want, how you license devices when it comes to Teams Room and Microsoft 365. Is that something you get into or talk about much, or do you leave that up
to You know it. People? It's really up to the organization where they are, and every group is a little bit different because of where they are in the enterprise agreement with Microsoft. So there's actually a large number of people that still have Teams Room standard licenses or Teams Room premium licenses on their tenant. Okay. Everyone is moving to either a Teams Room basic license or a Teams Room pro license. The pro license has a cost associated with it. The basic license is free. Okay.
So if you were to take a Logitech device, like the RallyBar out of the box, plug it in Yep. And you need to assign a license, you can assign the Microsoft Teams Room basic license, which is free to that device, and you're up and running with the Teams Room. Okay. There are simply some limitations. You can only have so many Teams Room basic licenses on your tenant, and then then you're there's just no more available.
And the basic license has a few restrictions from feature sets, like, dual monitor and AI capabilities and so forth. So really, it comes down to I think for most users, they're gonna be migrating into Teams Room Pro, licenses anyway, which actually is the right decision to make because it gives you access to the pro portal, which has some really great automatic remediation capabilities and some really good insights for tracking the
health of devices. You can go in and see which rooms are the most stable versus the least, and it gives you a lot of insights as to which devices should I deploy, which ones are being most utilized. So if I have to change my floor plan around, I know which room sizes are the most commonly used and so forth like that. So I think for most users, probably over the course of the next few months, they're just gonna be either on a basic or a pro license. Okay. And that's one thing
I noticed too. I think with pro, I come from the admin side of it is I found that I needed Pro, like, if I wanna manage the devices with Intune as well. Bring them to the portal, I think, and doing all the device management. And I'm trying to remember if you even, like, updates, being able to manage updates on these devices from Intune, it was
all go by that pro license. Yeah. If you want to have the benefit of that meaningful, serious management ecosystem, which is really fantastic that Microsoft has developed for these these devices, The pro management portal is the right place to do that. Okay. And so from there, in order to get that, you need a pro license. Yep. So it is the right decision to make for organizations, I think, if you have, you know, greater
than 20, 25 rooms. Okay. One other question, maybe we'll wrap up with this one is you had mentioned, like, having these devices, having your conference rooms, being able to recognize individual people in the room where you can and you have 10 people in, and as you're generating the transcript, if you're doing the AI summary and you want names associated with people, being able to recognize all of the people in the room as themselves versus it's just the conference room, and it could
have been any one of the people. What type of process is that to go through in order to get that set up and configured? Because I'm guessing you can't just have 10 people come into the room, and it's like, oh, I know who that is. I mean, there's a lot of information about us on the Internet, but not that much, I hope. This is not big brother. We're not using some some big facial recognition, scrubbing your social media. No. It's just none of that. So it's actually
really simple. As the tenant, as the admin, you have to go in and opt in for your organization to have speaker recognition enabled for your users. What that's using is Microsoft's biometric. And so, basically, once you opt in as an organization, all the users have the option to go into their Teams client, go into the settings right there from their their desktop Okay. Their Teams client, go into the settings and enable recognition, and then enroll their voice and face.
So it's a 2 step process. Admin enables, and once they enable, the users have the ability to self enroll. Okay. If they've self enrolled, what happens when they walk into a Teams room is the that Teams on the cloud is going to get their voice and their face, and it's going to compare it to the enrolled users and then identify
their name in the transcript. So then in the participants in a Teams call, instead of just seeing ignite meeting room 1, it'll say ignite meeting room 1, and then under it, it'll say, Ben and Alex. And every time you speak, it'll show in the transcript that Ben said this, and when I speak, Alex said this, instead of just being meeting room 1 said all of it. Okay. And then what happens, let's say because, again, you said it relies
on users enrolling themselves. Yes. If you get 10 people, ten's a nice round number, 5 people enrolled and 5 people haven't enrolled, do you get then a mix of individual users, then you still end up with Ignite conference room 1 that's the other 10? So the the enrollment only applies to people in meeting rooms because if you're logged in through your own account, maybe you're a remote user, you're already identified. So your identity is already
in the call. So for those users in the meeting room, if half of them have enrolled, they'll all be identified and the other half will not. So it'll say, for example, unidentified user 1, 2, 3, 4, 4. Doesn't lump them all into just the conference room. It still picks out individual users Right. But they're just generic Yeah. User 1, user 2. Unnamed user. Yeah.
Okay. And you do have the option to go back and add the name manually if you don't use the biometric to self to identify it for automatically. You can go in and manually change the name from unnamed user 1 to Ben said Right. If you can pick up who said what or have everybody, like, come in and introduce yourselves for the for Copilot. Right? Hi. I'm Ben. Very cool. So diving into you mentioned a few of your products too along along the
way here. I There was the Play Bars, the I know you have, like, some different headsets.
Yeah. Are there recommendations that you would have for users or companies looking to maybe start investing in a Teams room or if there's and I know it's gonna depend too based on size of the conference room, based on size of the company where maybe devices of, like, people getting started versus people that have massive conference rooms or just how would they start getting introduced to rolling out one of these Teams Room systems or recommendations from that Logitech product line?
Yeah. A super easy tool would be to go on to logitech.com/microsoft/trial. And you can fill out a form there, and that will send me Okay. Along with the rest of a large team, a message that says that you would like to sample some of these products. You'd like to demo them. And we do offer up to 2 room systems free for you to put into your your environment. They're yours to keep. And then you can get Teams Rooms set up and going, and you can see how these
these products work in your own environment. And you can feel, experience the benefit of them. So that's a great starting place. If we try to make it really simple, our portfolio is RallyBar Huddle, RallyBar Mini, and RallyBar. So Huddle is what it sounds like. So 2, 3, 4, 5 people in a small to Huddle space. Okay. RallyBar Mini is the small to medium room, and then Rally Bar is the medium to large room. Got it. We just try to make it as easy as possible to pick the one that's the
right for you right one for you. All of them are dual certified for both Android and Windows. All of them natively work with Microsoft Teams Rooms right out of the box, and all of them obviously have the certification and the full support and warranty and everything from Logitech and from Microsoft. Okay. Awesome. And we'll put some of those links too in
the show notes. I'll get some different links, resources from you that we'll include with the podcast so people can just click on it to go get a trial and any of that. Anything else, Alex, that you want people to know? Or I don't know if you've made it out of the conference hall, but just any other highlights from Ignite or anything like that you wanna share to wrap up? Yeah. I have loved walking around at Ignite. I'm just running into people. I mean, the
it's such a fantastic community. You bump into IT pros all over the place, from different organizations, from partners, MVPs that are helping to house sessions or educate the community. So it's a great learning opportunity. I've loved some of the sessions on how to do AI and enablement across organizations like workflow adaptations and so forth. So that's been a fantastic one for me. Obviously, AI is everywhere. And I think it's been really cool listening to people react to some of our
new devices. We rolled out, it's called the k 950 keyboard, which is k950 for Windows, which means that you get a copilot key directly on the keyboard, like, just like you would get on a copilot PC. Yep. So that's cool. People are loving that. But I think in general, these shows are just fantastic to meet with other people in the community. They are. That's one thing I've missed over
the last 5 years. Like, it's interesting because we're sitting here talking about conference rooms and making it feel like you're in person, but there is no matter how good the time, you feel like you can never replace what you get at these conferences from that in person. Like you said, just running into people, conversations you can have with people, something I know I've missed a lot over the
last 5 years and enjoyed. Yeah. Companies used to do these big off sites where everyone from all these different offices would fly into some city somewhere and hang out together. But now, I feel like they're doing an on-site instead. Everyone flies to the office and then hangs out in the office for a week, and then goes back home. Yeah. So it's fun. The on-site is the new off-site. But, these are great opportunities for that. And you're right. Just being able to hang out with
people in person is really cool. Yep. Very cool. Well, thanks, Alex. Appreciate you joining me and chatting about your products and Teams Rooms and all of that. And hope you enjoy the rest of the conference and have safe travels. We're all headed home as it's snowing in Chicago. It is. Yeah. Thanks, Ben. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
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