Think about all the ways your company uses video: From on-demand internal employee training to the advertising you create for your products and services, video is increasingly important to the modern enterprise. Companies with investments in Microsoft Office 365 are likely to store their video assets in the cloud using a combination of OneDrive, SharePoint, and the new Microsoft Stream video distribution platform. But the one issue that all organizations run into is that it’s not easy to search and find a specific video—or even specific portions of a video—that an employee needs to do their job.
What if you couldn’t remember the title of video but you could remember an idea, or a spoken phrase, or the person who said it? An update coming to all Office 365 deployments will offer those search options to make searching video and audio files on your corporate network much easier.
Transcribing every video using Artificial Intelligence
Office 365 solutions are all built on a world-class global cloud infrastructure, Microsoft Azure. Embedded into Azure is a layer of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables automated transcription for video and audio files. So, when you upload video of a company webinar, product development vlog from your star engineer, or a marketing podcast, the AI in Microsoft’s cloud can listen to those files then automatically transcribe all of the audio into a text file. If we’re being totally honest, then the AI transcription you get from this is not 100% accurate. But it’s more than just “good enough,” it is surprisingly good—even compared to paid human transcription services.
For organizations currently paying for an Office 365 Enterprise E5 subscription plan, these features will likely seem familiar. That’s because the AI transcription features are already available in Microsoft Stream, the built-in service for Office 365 enabling secure video management and sharing of corporate video content. Formerly known as “Office 365 Video,” Microsoft Stream allows your employees to securely upload, share, and manage videos within your organization from a common hub. However, while Stream is available to everyone with Office 365 Business Premium, Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 plans it was only the most expensive Enterprise E5 plan that allowed for automatic AI-powered transcription of videos.
Be more productive with automated video transcription
In another example of trickle-down technology similar to what Microsoft did with their anti-spoofing technology, they are making the Enterprise features available on a broader range of products. The AI-powered transcription features are being added to not only the videos you add to Microsoft Stream in the less expensive Business and Enterprise plans, but also for videos that you store in your team SharePoint personal OneDrive For Business cloud storage.
The auto-transcription of video and audio files uploaded to your corporate SharePoint, OneDrive, and Stream (for example, a webinar presentation or online team meeting) means your employees have access to a fully-searchable library of transcribed text. This means there’s no need for a “designated note-taker” in meetings and anyone with proper authorization can search for information using keywords in Stream, a SharePoint site, and their own OneDrive to get instant results. The AI can also recognize objects in photos and faces of employees in videos, then label them. This auto-labeling is useful because now you can search for specific information in receipts to confirm the legitimacy of business expenses from your sales team and automatically add the name of the speaker for closed captioning of a corporate video. It’s also obvious how this new feature empowers any employees in your organization with certain accessibility needs.
Enjoy security in the cloud
One of the most important benefits of using Microsoft Stream to share your audio and video content is that it never leaves the secure Microsoft cloud infrastructure. The problem with so-called free hosting of corporate video assets in YouTube is that Google makes money off advertising. If your company sells management software for apartment complexes, then it’s extremely likely when you upload your promotional video to YouTube that Google will sell pre-roll ads to your competitors—and those ads might get superimposed over your video while your prospects are watching. You can control the ads shown on your videos by paying for a special YouTube account, but if your organization already uses Office 365 then it’s much easier to store in the secure Microsoft Azure cloud—and you get the benefit of AI-powered transcription.
In addition to the AI-powered transcription of your files stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, the Microsoft AI also helps to protect your content, keep you compliant with government and industry regulations, and thwart malicious attacks. For example, in the case of ransomware attacks you have to detect them early. The AI built into the Microsoft cloud infrastructure behind Office 365 helps spot potential attacks against files you store in OneDrive.
In terms of regulatory compliance, Office 365 allows you to apply native data loss prevention (DLP) policies and conduct native eDiscovery searches on the text generated by the AI from the audio/video stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. You can also use the AI to automatically apply these policies and protect your content.
Get key insights from your stored files
The AI will help suggest which files you have stored in your SharePoint and OneDrive folders are the most useful based on the context of your current task. When you view the files stored on your OneDrive (whether it’s using your PC’s File Explorer, your Mac’s Finder, or even on the Office.com page in any web browser), you’ll get a new Inside look summary of the file that gives you important information at a glance, including estimated time to read and key points from the document, along with intelligence on the popularity of the document with others in your organization.
This deep file information can be leveraged by the AI built into Office 365 to recommend relevant files. It’s all based on the AI observing user behavior and content usage in your organization which can then build a profile to understand how you work, who you work with, and activity on content shared with you.
These AI recommendations can make it easier to create new documents by reusing existing content that makes sense within the context of your new document. The idea is that while working on a new document or email, the AI understands the context of what you are working on and can recommend a file stored in OneDrive and SharePoint with a relevant paragraph of text, a chart, et cetera.
How can AI enhancements help your business?
As of the publication of this blog post, not all of the AI enhancements are available to every Office 365 subscriber. There are numerous scenarios where the AI built into Office 365 can make your organization more productive, but we know dealing with new technologies can be overwhelming. Let Amaxra’s Office 365 expert consultants help you to determine where AI can help your business.