Microsoft has announced that its collaborative chat service, Teams, is upgrading video calls to allow users to view up to nine participants at a time, rather than four. After growing tremendously in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the service is now making some improvements to the collaboration experience.
According to a Microsoft representative on the Teams UserVoice page (via Windows Central), the ability to view nine participants will arrive before the end of the month. However, Microsoft is also working to increase that even further in the future, though no specifics were given in that regard.
On a separate UserVoice post, the same representative also said that Teams will soon support multi-window chatting by the end of April. If you prefer having different windows for different conversations, instead of multiple tabs, this will be a welcome change.
Last week, Microsoft revealed that Teams was used to make more than 2.7 billion minutes of calls on March 31 alone, and with that news, it also announced some new features. Custom video backgrounds are rolling out to all users now, and a "raise hand" feature is also coming later this month. Microsoft will also bring AI-powered noise suppression to Teams later this year.