Tired of cleaning up your workplace prior to every group chat? Microsoft’s Teams can now blur the background for you.

Teams is Microsoft’s alternative to Slack for team chat, and it consists of a video conferencing service. Microsoft revealed the blurring feature in an article yesterday (by means of The Next Web).

The idea is that meetings must focus on individuals going to, not the environments they take place to be in. Facial recognition is used to find you in the shot and the background is instantly blurred. The post includes this GIF of the tool in action:

Yes: that is Professor Robert Kelly, the professional on Korean politics whose kids famously disrupted an interview on the BBC. Here’s that clip, in case you in some way missed it back in 2017:

This is an excellent way to display a function, so congratulations to the marketing team behind this.

Groups also just recently added a recording feature to teams, complete with records. From a Microsoft blog post:

With conference recording in Teams, you or other invitees who missed the meeting can playback documented audio, video and material at any time. Pull up a transcript, powered by Microsoft Stream, and search for keywords so you can enhance your time while getting captured up.

It’s excellent to see Microsoft stepping up their game, and I hope it drives other business in the area to keep including new features.