Microsoft Teams Phone: Recent New Features and What's Coming with Emily Kirby, Microsoft

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, telephony and UC administrators running or migrating to Teams Phone, and partners advising on PBX displacement, call queues and Copilot licensing.

Guest: Emily Kirby — Senior Product Manager, Teams Calling, Microsoft

Emily Kirby, Senior Product Manager on the Microsoft Teams Calling team, now owns the core calling space including multi-line, emergency calling and SBA. She walks through what shipped over the last engineering semester, the AI investments landing in Teams Phone, and where the calling team is putting its cycles next.

Many thanks to AudioCodes, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Multi-line calling shipped in early June after a multi-year effort — multiple phone numbers from any geography can now be assigned to a single account, closing a long-standing PBX displacement gap for users who move between offices or countries but keep their old number. ▶ 2:33
• Consult and merge in a meeting shipped in late May: you can dial out to an external number, navigate an IVR during the consult, then merge the party back into the call. Driven by financial services scenarios where an adviser is with a client and needs to pull in an SME. ▶ 4:07
• The vaguely named 'call transfer improvements' on the roadmap is actually a bundle worth reading the fine print on — presence for the transfer destination, blind handoff so the transfer window no longer stays open, and consult/transfer buttons promoted out of the three-dot menu into the control bar. ▶ 4:38
• Intelligent call delegation (previously Copilot Call Delegation) requires both a Teams Phone licence and an individual Copilot licence; it screens calls, lets the caller push through if urgent, and behaves much like the iPhone and Android call-screening experiences. ▶ 7:43
• Automatic recording for call queues is now officially on the public roadmap. It decouples recording from the individual agent — no manual start, no orphaned files scattered across agents' OneDrive — and centralises recordings and transcripts in SharePoint. ▶ 9:13
• Queue auto-recording itself sits with the regular call queue rather than behind Teams Premium, but the payoff — recap and reviewing recordings in-product — comes through the Queues app, and the transcripts become the grounding data for future queue intelligence. ▶ 10:47
• Kirby's personal focus this semester is reducing friction on the 'commoditised' intelligence rather than new features — not having to turn Copilot or transcription on for every call, and making post-call recaps easier to find. Arbuthnot's ask: a default transcribe-on switch. ▶ 13:21
• At least half of the calling team's investment still goes on keeping the lights on: 'it doesn't matter if we have all the AI in the world if you can't make a phone call.' Emergency calling and SBA sit in that bucket, and there's a deep-dive E911 session with Jamie Stark on YouTube. ▶ 12:20
• The Teams Phone Community is a grassroots quarterly call run by the calling team's PMs with guests from the field and services; past sessions are on YouTube and the team runs an open call for topics. ▶ 15:55

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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