Microsoft Teams is about to make it easier to chat during meetings

What you need to know

• Microsoft Teams will soon support chat bubbles during meetings.
• Chat bubbles will appear on everyone's screen during a meeting rather than making people open up the chat window.
• Microsoft first announced chat bubbles for Teams in July 2020.

Microsoft Teams allows people within meetings to communicate with video, voice, and text. However, meetings make it difficult to communicate through all of those mediums at once. To combat said difficulty, a new feature for Microsoft Teams will let you see what people type within the chat of a meeting without having to pop open the meeting's chat window.

An upcoming update to Teams will bring support for chat bubbles. These chat bubbles will appear on everyone's screen within a meeting, making it easier to see what people type during a meeting. Right now, you have to manually open the chat window within a meeting to see what people type. This can crowd your screen and means you have to manually switch back and forth between the chat window and other items, such as the participants list.

"Chats sent during a Teams meeting will surface on the screens of all meeting participants, making the chat more central to the conversation," reads the feature's description in the Microsoft 365 roadmap. The feature is currently set to arrive in May 2021, though dates on the Microsoft 365 roadmap are always subject to change.

Microsoft first announced that chat bubbles were on the way in July 2020.