I asked Microsoft whether it has any plans to give presenters or organizers greater control over AI features in Teams, including the ability to turn off meeting AI features, such as Copilot, entirely. The company pointed me to a recent update on its admin portal, where it clearly states Teams will finally add an in-meeting toggle to manage AI features.

Microsoft says this feature is called “Meeting AI” and it’s supposed to give organizers or presenters greater control over AI features in a meeting.

I personally find AI in Teams quite useful for certain meetings and unnecessary for others. For example, Facilitator, which can automatically take notes during meetings, is useful when you’re supposed to finish tasks after the call. I have found it useful for my use cases, and I can say the same about transcription or AI translation.

However, some of you might simply dislike AI features, and Microsoft appears to understand that after all the backlash.

Now, as first spotted by Windows Latest, Microsoft shared the following note in a post on the admin center:

“Microsoft Teams will add an in-meeting toggle for licensed organizers and presenters to turn Meeting AI (Copilot, Facilitator, recap) on or off during live meetings,” the company said. “Rollout starts early July 2026, with no changes to existing compliance or licensing requirements.”

Microsoft also shared a screenshot that shows off the Meeting AI toggle in Teams, and it’s quite straightforward. You can independently turn off Copilot and Recap, and just keep Facilitator if you prefer that feature.

Likewise, you can also choose to turn everything off, turn everything on, or manually toggle each option.

I’m neither advocating for AI nor against it, but regardless of which side we stand on, we can all strongly agree that AI needs to be entirely optional, and presenters or organizers should be given greater control. Microsoft is finally delivering it, and the company could help make it an industry standard.

Can you manage meeting AI controls even when AI is turned on by your tenant?

Microsoft notes that Meeting AI appears only when it’s allowed by policy, so existing tenant policies are respected. That means the toggle will not appear if Meeting AI is specifically turned off by policy.

By default, it’s supposed to appear when the policy allows it, and it should make it easier for organizers and presenters to control what AI features are active during meetings.

When Meeting AI is turned off, Teams won’t generate Copilot responses, Facilitator responses, or Notes. However, it does not affect previous meetings, as the control only applies to new meetings.

There’s also an important transcription dependency. If Meeting AI is used with transcription, the two remain connected. Turning on Meeting AI automatically turns on transcription and generates a recap. Likewise, starting transcription automatically enables Meeting AI and recap.

In other words, if a meeting must avoid AI entirely, transcription and Meeting AI must both remain off.

The rollout begins with Targeted Release in early July 2026 and should complete by mid-July. General Availability begins in mid-July and is expected to complete by the end of July 2026.

Microsoft officials say the ability to turn off all AI features easily in Teams will show up across all devices, including Windows, macOS, mobile, and web.

Other AI and general improvements coming to Microsoft Teams

At the same time, Microsoft is testing a controversial feature in which AI (Facilitator) will automatically listen to your meetings and start a conversation in the chat when it detects a knowledge gap or members appear uncertain. Teams AI will automatically try to fill the gap by answering using Bing-powered search queries.

This is being seen as a major concern for privacy, so there are no plans to turn it on by default, and if it’s turned on in your organization, Meeting AI will let you turn it off.

In addition, Teams is testing simpler meeting controls to reduce accidental clicks (screen share), and faster performance via Efficiency mode on low-end PCs.

The post Microsoft caves after Teams AI backlash, will let you turn off Copilot, Facilitator and Recap mid-meeting appeared first on Windows Latest

In 2007, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 consoles started dying — overheating until three lights on the front blinked red, a defect gamers came to call the “red ring of death.” Microsoft’s response was to extend the warranty on every machine and take a charge of more than $1 billion to fix the problem, making it one of the costliest product failures in the company’s history.

Microsoft could afford it financially, but the bigger factor was strategy. Xbox was a bet on the living room, and for a company minting money on Windows and Office at the time, losing a billion or so was a justifiable cost of staying in the game.

Nearly two decades later, that patience has run out.

“Going forward, this cannot continue,” the new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote in a memo to employees last month, offering a blunt assessment of a business that has spent more than $20 billion over five years, only to see its core revenue fall by nearly half a billion dollars, running at a thin 3% profit margin, by Microsoft’s own internal measures.

With thousands of layoffs expected to be announced across Microsoft as soon as next week, the Xbox division is likely to be among the hardest hit.

The cuts reach across the company — including sales and consulting — part of a restructuring that has become routine around the close of Microsoft’s fiscal year. But for Xbox, they’re an early step in a broader effort to reset the business, rein in costs, and position the division for healthier profits.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been blunt about it: the company has spent years subsidizing Xbox rather than profiting from it, and that era is over. The videos and livestreams of people playing Xbox games that fill YouTube generate more money than Microsoft makes from the games themselves, he noted in an appearance on the Hard Fork podcast.

“No one can accuse Microsoft of not having invested for the last 25 years,” Nadella said. “And now we have to turn this into a sustainable business.”

Long-term strategic bet

Turning it around means breaking a pattern that runs through Xbox’s entire history.

Xbox launched in 2001 and lost money for most of its first decade. Microsoft absorbed the losses and stayed in — going up against Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo — because it saw a strategic prize in owning a piece of the living room, and later of mobile. Online gaming also gave the company early experience running services at scale, which fed its cloud ambitions.

Over time, the goal shifted from selling hardware to selling subscriptions.

Xbox Live, launched in 2002, turned online play into recurring revenue. Game Pass, which arrived in 2017, let players pay a monthly fee — the top tier is about $23 — for a library of games, including Microsoft’s own new releases the day they come out. The idea was to get people paying for Xbox everywhere: consoles, PCs, phones and the cloud.

And when growth stalled, Microsoft doubled down. It paid $7.5 billion in 2021 for Bethesda, the studio behind Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, then $69 billion in 2023 for Activision Blizzard (whose games include Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo and the mobile hit Candy Crush) the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history.

A series of economic headwinds

Microsoft could afford to be patient through all of it. Now it’s not so simple. In recent years, almost everything about the economics of gaming has turned against Xbox at the same time.

Hardware loses money, and AI is making it worse. Microsoft sells consoles at or below cost, banking on games and subscriptions to make up the difference. But AI data centers are consuming so much memory and storage that chip prices have spiked. That has forced Microsoft to raise Xbox console prices, most recently a $100-to-$150 hike this summer that it blamed directly on component costs.

Xbox lost the console war. By most estimates, Sony’s PlayStation 5 has outsold the Xbox Series X and S more than two to one. A smaller base means fewer game sales and subscriptions to offset the upfront hardware losses. That has left Xbox a distant second for the entire generation.

Revenue is shrinking. Even setting aside the games it gained from Activision, Xbox’s annual revenue has fallen nearly $500 million over five years — while the money going into the business keeps climbing. It has been investing more to earn less.

Microsoft’s most recent quarterly filing shows gaming revenue of $16.8 billion for the nine months through March, down about $1.1 billion, or 6%, from a year earlier.

Game Pass cuts into sales. Handing subscribers a new game the day it launches undercuts the roughly $70 they would have paid to buy it. The service delivers steady subscription income, but thinner economics on the games themselves.

Activision didn’t fix the margins. Even with one of gaming’s most profitable businesses folded in, Xbox earns only about 3 cents of profit on every dollar — well under the 17 to 22 cents typical in the industry. If the biggest acquisition in company history can’t move the margin, little will.

Every spare billion is flowing to AI. Microsoft is pouring more than $100 billion a year into the data centers and chips behind its AI push, trying to capitalize on the boom. Against a risk and payoff that big, a gaming business that barely breaks even feels like yesterday’s strategic bet.

What’s next for Xbox

The cuts have already started. In recent weeks, Microsoft has signaled plans to close or sell some studios, including Ninja Theory, maker of the acclaimed “Hellblade” series.

Shedding staff, studios and marketing will lift Xbox’s profit margins in the near term. What it won’t do is fix the underlying problem: a business can trim its way to a better number only so much before it has to generate more revenue.

Sharma’s plan, so far, is to concentrate on Xbox’s biggest franchises, funding blockbusters like Halo and Fallout while pulling back elsewhere. It’s leaning on Game Pass and releasing most of its games on PCs and rival consoles from Sony and Nintendo, reaching players well beyond Xbox’s shrinking base, even as it holds back a few new exclusives like Gears of War to give owners a reason to stay.

Microsoft is also rethinking the console itself. In her memo, Sharma described a “hardware component crisis” that has left the company unable to make as many consoles as players want, and called for “a new business model and partnerships” for its hardware.

How far the reset ultimately goes is an open question. The Information reported that Microsoft has weighed making Xbox a standalone subsidiary, a joint venture, or a spin-off, though nothing is imminent.

Whatever happens next, it’s clear that times have changed. In 2007, as the red ring of death crisis emerged, Peter Moore, who ran the Xbox business at the time, and his boss Robbie Bach went to then-CEO Steve Ballmer to ask for the money to repair and replace the failing consoles.

Ballmer didn’t flinch. “What’s it going to cost?” he asked, as Moore later recalled.

Told it was $1.15 billion, Ballmer said, simply: “Do it.”

Moore credits that decision with saving Xbox. There would have been no Xbox One, he said, without Ballmer’s willingness to spend more than a billion dollars to protect the brand.

But nearly two decades later, Microsoft is done writing that kind of check for Xbox.

As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America's Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat. That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households, meaning that the number of people impacted by these outages is likely to be much larger... Millions of Americans, however, will be contending with a heatwave that is blanketing much of the country, including in Philadelphia where the Salute to Independence Semiquincentennial Parade that had been set for Friday was canceled due to the dangerous heat wave, according to Philadelphia ABC station WPVI. Elsewhere, America's Independence Day Parade, which was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on July 4 in downtown Washington, D.C. was canceled by organizers late Friday evening due to the extreme heat in the District of Columbia... Amtrak announced it will be canceling a number of trains due to heat-related conditions. The outages seemed to last throughout the day, with 790,103 household outages still in effect by 4:30 p.m. EST. Ironically, the power outages hit several American states that were among the country's original 13 freedom-declaring colonies, including New Jersey (143,072 outages), Pennsylvania (40,944 outages), and Virginia (27,392 outages). CNBC adds that America's largest power grid operator said Friday "it was under a federal alert to cut electricity consumption across its territory as it battled generator outages, massive overloading on its transmission lines and a surge in air conditioning use from prolonged sweltering heat." PJM said it told utilities to reduce electricity to customers who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. PJM serves 67 million people in the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., area. Spot wholesale electricity prices in northern Virginia, home to the largest collection of data centers in the world, have surged beyond $2,000 per megawatt hour this week. That compares to about $40 per MWh when PJM is not in distress.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate "is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland," remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added "It would be disingenuous to say otherwise.") But in 2026 the EU now requires a country-by-country compliance report, and the New York Times notes that Microsoft "was most likely the first major U.S. technology company to make a so-called country by country report of its finances to comply..." Like other big companies, Microsoft uses transactions between subsidiaries to shift profits around to reduce its tax bill. The report revealed a consistent pattern: high returns in low-tax jurisdictions and slim margins in higher-tax ones. The report showed the sometimes absurd results. Microsoft said it had generated almost 40 percent of its pretax income in tax-friendly Ireland, where it employed about 3 percent of its global work force. In higher-tax Germany, the largest economy in Europe, Microsoft earned barely half of 1 percent of its global profits, it said. Excluding Ireland, the company said, it generated less than 2 percent of its worldwide pretax earnings in Europe... [In Luxembourg Microsoft said it had $283 million in pretax income with only 34 employees.] [America's] Internal Revenue Service is challenging profit-shifting transactions used by Microsoft, and is seeking back taxes of nearly $29 billion4. The company has said it disagrees with the I.R.S. and said in a securities filing that it "will vigorously contest" the proposed tax bills. This week a Microsoft blog post offered their own "context," arguing that tax is "one important measure of contribution, but it is not the only one. "Our investments, partnerships, infrastructure, and long-term presence in countries around the world also reflect a commitment to helping strengthen the economies and communities where we operate, today and for the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Swift Observatory was launched in 2004, but recent solar storms have pushed its orbit lower, and it's in danger of burning up in Earth's atmosphere as soon as this year. To try and stave off its demise, NASA has enlisted Katalyst Space Technologies. The company's Link spacecraft launched Friday with the goal of intercepting Swift, which has no propulsion system, and boosting its orbit back to its original position. Right now, Swift is circling at an altitude of 224 miles, and Link is aiming to raise that by about 150 miles.

Using a three-armed spacecraft to lift a satellite 150 miles higher into orbit is challenging enough, but the spee …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The US Department of Energy reportedly deleted about 6,000 pages related to energy conservation as a historic heatwave tears across the country.

The deletion was suspiciously timed, following Republican outrage over Mayor Zohran Mamdani asking New Yorkers to help reduce strain on the grid by setting their AC to 78 degrees. Republicans like Ted Cruz (who has famously fled severe weather in his home state), Nikki Haley, and Representative Nancy Mace (South Carolina) quickly pounced, framing the request as socialism and an act of war on women in menopause (the Republican Party is notoriously concerned about women's health).

Of course, this i …

Read the full story at The Verge.