Being out of office is great, until Microsoft Teams welcomes you back with 37 unread Microsoft Teams chats and channel threads. Half the time, you don’t have any option other than to spend your entire first day back catching up on everything you missed, while trying to filter out what’s actually important.

With AI in the picture, these are exactly the kinds of tasks you should be able to hand off. Fortunately, that’s exactly what Read AI’s latest feature now does for Microsoft Teams.

Read AI can now deliver daily Teams recaps straight to your inbox

As announced via a post on Read AI's blog, the tool is getting a new feature called Summaries for Microsoft Teams Chats and Channels. If you aren't familiar with Read AI, it's an AI notetaker for meetings and summaries for Zoom, Google Meet, and, of course, Microsoft Teams.

The blog explained that Read AI is aiming to solve exactly the issue I explained in the first paragraph. The Summaries feature uses AI to "deliver concise daily recaps of your Teams chats and channel conversations," and will display the summary once you log into Microsoft Teams every morning, based on your time zone. If you're like me and log on at a later time than most, you can also choose the time you'd like to receive your daily recap, so it lands in your Teams inbox when it’s actually useful, whether that’s first thing in the morning or a bit later in the day.

The feature essentially allows Read AI to quietly stick around during meetings, digest updates from platforms it's connected to, like emails and chats, and then use all of it to organize everything into easy-to-consume recaps.

This feature is designed to save users the time of digging through threads and threads of conversations, and one of the greatest parts about it is that it shouldn't take a lot of time to set up. Of course, certain Teams conversations might have a lot of confidential information, and you wouldn’t necessarily want to share access with just any tool. Read AI seems to have taken that into account, users can choose which channels to follow and how they want to receive their summaries (whether in a direct message, in-channel, or via the Read AI web app). Additionally, though the feature will be turned on by default initially, users will have the option to switch it off.

To enable it, all you need to do is connect Teams to Read AI to allow the tool to summarize your messages. You might need admin approval to allow Read AI to summarize conversations within Channels. You'll then need to enable Push to Teams, which'll allow the AI tool to send your daily summaries directly into your Microsoft Teams account, whether that's as a direct message to you or posted in a specific channel. This way, you won't have to check another app to stay updated.

All in all, it seems like a pretty useful addition, especially if you’re constantly bouncing between meetings or catching up after some time away.