Microsoft is committed to mobility by improving its mobile apps with handwriting recognition

Microsoft continues to focus on productivity, especially now that many users are making use of its tools to work remotely motivated by the pandemic that grips us. Perhaps this is why Microsoft's productivity-related mobile apps are bracing for a deluge of improvements

Teams, Office Mobile and Outlook, three classics from the Redmond-based company are preparing to embrace improvements such as Cortana Integration in Microsoft Teams or handwriting recognition in Office Mobile, Reactions in Outlook..

Mobility improvements

Improvements that focus on remote communication in the work environment thanks to Outlook, a commitment to messaging in educational groups with Teams or greater use of mobile tools with Office Mobile. Microsoft focuses its improvements on these three fields and brings all these changes to both iOS and Android, a platform that we remember gives life to its new Surface Duo.

And starting with Cortana, once again the personal assistant is the protagonist. In a flurry of situations that it has gone through in recent months, Cortana is now gaining a presence in Office 365 apps with the aim of facilitating interaction with other users. Remember that Microsoft has already focused Cortana on the professional market.

There will be numerous changes that we are going to see. Improvements and new options that affect different applications and that will see how they are progressively added to mobile productivity applications. These are the changes we will see:

• More role for Cortana Microsoft's personal assistant will be integrated into Outlook and Teams to perform different tasks such as searching for emails, appointments in the calendar, locate messages from a specific user, files that were shared... In principle, the integration will only support the use in English.
• Shortcuts for micro tasks Office 365 applications gain the ability to create small shortcuts with a multitude of different tasks. Those called 'Micro tasking shortcuts' allow you to create small surveys in Office or Teams, OneDrive will allow the use of shortcuts to files, Outlook will show the time according to location when creating new appointments, Outlook will also integrate a navigation window when clicking on a link…
• Improvements for scanning Handwriting recognition after taking photos of a document is closer to Microsoft Lens, an improvement that will later make the leap to Office for mobile, again first in English.In addition, Microsoft Lens will also integrate with Teams to capture content, annotate it, and share it in the messaging app.
• Annotate PDFs in Office. Office will also support annotation and can include notes, shapes, dates, and timestamps.
• Reactions in Outlook. Apart from increasing the security of emails, Microsoft is committed to adding reactions to its mail app. You don't want to answer a message with a simple yes? Add a thumbs up reaction and you're done.

More information | Microsoft