Microsoft has built a bouncer to keep bots out of Teams meetings. “Bots have begun joining meetings that participants never intended them to attend,” wrote Microsoft product marketing manager Meera Ajam in a Monday post. “For example, after connecting a third-party service to a meeting, some users have found that its bot continues joining future meetings automatically.”
Ajam thinks bots butting into meetings that include discussion of sensitive matters is a potential security and privacy problem. Your correspondent has personal experience of this when transcription bots add themselves to meetings conducted under non-disclosure agreements. Microsoft has therefore built tech that sees Teams require a human to check a bot’s ID in the “lobby” where guests wait before a meeting.
If a human rates a bot as worthy of coming inside, it gets to join the meeting. The software giant says it’s “strengthened Teams' ability to distinguish between bots and human participants as they join a meeting” by using “a combination of behavioral and infrastructure signals to identify bots with a higher degree of accuracy.” That’s not a guarantee that Teams will detect all bots, but Microsoft’s tech requires multiple clicks to let a bot attend a meeting.
“Admitting a bot should be a deliberate decision, not something that happens by mistake,” Ajam wrote. Some users want bots to attend a meeting. Your correspondent prefers a third-party transcription-bot to Microsoft’s own.
The software giant recognizes that and plans to add “a registration path for independent software vendors (ISVs) that build meeting experiences for Microsoft Teams.” That path will mean bot-builders will be able to register with Microsoft and include a self-identification marker in their join requests. “When Teams recognizes that marker, it can identify the bot as a known participant,” Ajam wrote.
“We're currently working with a limited set of ISVs to preview this capability and validate the experience before broader availability,” she added, before promising more detail about registrations soon. There’s peril in this plan for Microsoft, which could make itself an arbiter of what constitutes a good bot worthy of admission to Teams. Just like bouncers do in real life, often to the chagrin of plain-looking revelers.
Microsoft has started rollout of its bot-bouncer. Once it’s in place, the software behemoth will retire the CAPTCHAs it currently uses to put bots in their place.
Originally published at theregister.com
