Introducing Team Huddle, voice activated meeting rooms, and more | #customersupport #supporticket

Highlights:

• Team Huddle: Start a persistent audio and video meeting where colleagues can come and go as they please—replicating the spontaneous conversations of office environments.
• Touchless meeting rooms: Control your RingCentral Rooms meetings with voice activation and remote controls straight from your smartphone (via the RingCentral mobile app).
• Fast chat on mobile: Open up a chat window with any meeting participant by long holding their portrait. 

For the past year, companies across the world have had to rethink work—and they succeeded. Many companies worked from home, added new technologies, encouraged time off, and completely shifted their stances on work culture. In many ways, these changes are likely here to stay.

Chief among these changes is the freedom to work from anywhere. Studies show that business leaders are more open to hybrid work than ever. In fact, Deloitte just announced that employees can continue working from anywhere—joining the ranks of Google, Facebook, and Salesforce.

As our customers decide on what’s best for them, we’re here to prepare their workers for anything. That includes giving them more options to collaborate both inside and outside of the office. In other words, our customers’ employees have everything they need to innovate, no matter where they are.

Here are our latest features that make this possible:

1. Team Huddle: Hop in and out of conversations at any time

When we worked in the office, having a quick chat was as easy as walking to a coworker’s desk. Group chats were the same—gather your team and head to an open space. 

These ad hoc conversations were often wellsprings of ideas that turned casual chats into deeper connections and ideas. But these conversations are often lost in today’s video-first world, where every interaction with colleagues is scheduled far in advance. 

Team Huddle is designed to recreate those spontaneous moments in RingCentral. Similar to services like Discord and Telegram, Team Huddle allows you to easily meet with teammates whenever you want in a persistent audio or video call. You, your colleagues, and even those outside of the organization are free to come and go as you please, creating a true office-like virtual environment.

Use Team Huddle to create open channels for project discussions, casual conversations, urgent issues, or simply to just connect with your colleagues and see their faces. 

Team Huddle is part of our ongoing effort to make meetings move with you—with the freedom and mobility to collaborate from anywhere. Here are some other ways the RingCentral app makes this possible:

We’re proud that our Team Huddle service is the first in the industry with both audio and video capabilities, and we’re excited to see how you use them.

2. RingCentral Rooms: Now with voice activation and personal device controls

Whether your company returns to the office completely or on a hybrid basis, meeting rooms are expected to make a comeback. But there might be several reasons employees are reluctant to get back into old habits—chief among them the cleanliness of high-touch surfaces.

Now there’s no need to touch anything to get started. RingCentral Rooms can be controlled with either voice commands or right from your own mobile device’s RingCentral app. 

How does this work? For voice commands, participants in the room can say, “Hi RingCentral, join meeting” to join the next meeting on the calendar. The host can then control the meeting from their own mobile device (via RingCentral app).

Learn more in our post, “New touchless features for your meeting rooms now available”.

3. A much quicker way to send messages during meetings

In our increasingly busy schedules, meetings can often be hard to keep up with. And if you want to chat with another participant in a meeting, you have to jump through several cumbersome steps on your smartphone to open the chat window.

Now, participants on mobile devices can long hold a participant’s portrait to open up a chat window with that person. This allows you to quickly message someone while the topic is still relevant and jump right back into the conversation.

Recent releases

In addition to the latest and upcoming features, here’s a look at what we released in the last few months:

Perfecting your meeting experience

Whether it’s a spontaneous conversation or a group discussion for an upcoming project, we’re here to give your teams the best meeting experience possible. Try out these new features in your RingCentral app today.