Microsoft working on new version of Teams app: report

The report suggests that the new application has been rebuilt from scratch to improve its system resource usage on PCs and laptops significantly.

“The software giant has recently started testing this new Teams client broadly inside Microsoft, with plans to roll out a preview to Microsoft Teams users in March,” the report added.

The app – known as Microsoft Teams 2.0 or 2.1 internally – should use 50% less memory, burden the CPU less, thus resulting in better battery life on laptops.

Rishi Tandon, the former head of engineering at Microsoft Teams, has first outlined the changes or improvements in Microsoft Teams that were in the works in 2021.

“With this change, we are taking a major step in #MicrosoftTeams Teams architecture. We are moving away from Electron to Edge Webview2. Teams will continue to remain a hybrid app but now it will be powered by #MicrosoftEdge. Also Angular is gone. We are now 100% on reactjs,” he has tweeted.

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A fresh, ground-up version of Teams comes at a time when Microsoft is heavily engaged with integrating somethin similar to ChatGPT – a generative AI conversational chatbot – into its ecosystem to get a head start in the race with its rival Google.

Recently, Microsoft launched a new version of its search engine Bing that is integrated with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to provide users with a ChatGPT-like experience.

“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” read a blog post from Microsoft, quoting chairman and chief executive Satya Nadella.

“Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge, powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”

People are using search engines for answers to complex problems, not merely for finding a website. That’s why more than half of the 10 billion searches every day on search engines go unanswered, according to the blog post.