One of the prominent, positive things about Zoom is its custom background features and it appears to have some new competition in that area, courtesy of Microsoft Teams. This feature is growing in popularity lately, slowly becoming an essential component of video meetings, so as people consider their group chatting options, comparing Teams and Zoom in this arena could be important.
Custom backgrounds are the unlikely hero of video chatting. As the name implies, this feature lets the user replace anything behind them during a video chat with a background image or video of their choice. The simple use case is to swap the real background for something that looks more professional to viewers, but of course, there are lots of ways to have fun with it. People have enjoyed chatting from famous locations, movie and TV show sets, other people's homes, outer space, Sesame Street, and so on. Despite how much fun it can add, it's also a practical tool to have. Custom backgrounds mean less time worrying about organizing the space behind a caller, which means less time setting up the call area, leading to more efficiency.
This uptick in interest in custom backgrounds has led Microsoft Teams to recently adopt this feature. The service previously used an AI-driven background blur option capable of picking out the human sitting in front of the camera and blurring the image behind them automatically. Now the app will leverage its ability to distinguish a human from the rest of the image to change the background without requiring use of a green screen, per the Microsoft blog.
Does Teams Do Custom Backgrounds Better than Zoom
In a head-to-head comparison, Zoom still has a better custom backgrounds feature than Microsoft Teams for the moment. Zoom's implementation is more robust, allowing users to upload their own images and even letting people use videos. The platform also includes options to tweak those images once they're uploaded and supports the use of a green screen. Microsoft is promising to let people add their own images in the future but right now the only available backgrounds are a collection of stock images. Teams custom backgrounds are also only available to a select group of users. As of this writing, the feature is still being rolled out so not everyone who uses Microsoft Teams has it, and it only functions on the desktop version of the app.
That said, it's very likely Microsoft could improve its custom backgrounds and surpass Zoom. The company has expressed a commitment to improving the service throughout 2020 and beyond, with a slew of new features and more applications of its impressive AI. In terms of resources, Microsoft has more at its disposal than Zoom, and it wouldn't be a stretch to think it'll leverage that to take advantage of the coronavirus-induced work from home phase we're in as a society. The company recently predicted people will continue working from home once COVID-19 is less of a threat, adding more reason to believe Teams will only get better. At the minimum, with Microsoft Teams having even a lesser version of custom backgrounds, it's at least giving people bothered by Zoom's problematic security issues a more viable alternative for group video chat.
Source: Microsoft