Windows 10: Introducing Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS and later for Android

Brink · Nov 4, 2019

Play My Emails in Outlook and get time back in your day

So you’re on the train trying to read your emails. Getting ready for work is taking longer than expected. You’re in your car thinking about what’s new in your inbox and what’s in store for you today. These are common moments in the daily life of busy professionals that could be filled with more meaningful or productive activities. Time is precious, at home and at work, and taking the time to stay on top of your personal communications and commitments may be time better spent doing other things.

Microsoft AI has made great progress driving innovation for companies. And we are well on our way helping people change the world for Good. How can AI help people get time back in their day so they can focus on spending time with the people in their lives that matter most? AI in Microsoft 365 is leading the approach to put people at the center and use intelligent, personalized experiences to transform your productivity.

Today we are very excited to introduce Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS that utilizes Cortana, your personal productivity assistant, to catch up on what’s new in your inbox so you can get time back in your day. With an intelligent read out of your emails, natural language interaction with Cortana and a user interface designed for people on the move, you can stay organized, on top of what matters and get back to living life outside your inbox.

Outlook for iOS and Android is an integrated email and calendar app that now provides a unique way to interact with your inbox using AI with a personal assistant. This represents a significant shift in the way you manage your email and time management. Outlook, together with Cortana and Microsoft 365 delivers innovation in your inbox with personalized productivity experiences. Play My Emails is the first Cortana feature to be an integral part of the Office 365 core experience. This means that it is the first Cortana-related capability where Cortana has met specific requirements set out in the Office 365 section of the Microsoft Trust Center and the Online Service Terms (OST).

You can choose how you’d like to listen to your new emails with masculine and feminine voices for Cortana. Play My Emails is rolling out with a new masculine voice option.

Play My Emails is starting to roll out today to customers in the United States in Outlook for iOS following later in Outlook for Android. So when you’re in transit, multi-tasking or driving to where you need to get to next, catch up and act on emails even when your hands are busy with other things. Check it out!

Now let’s dive into the details:

Designed for mobile experiences

The new user experience is optimized for people on the move and ideal when connected to an audio device. Play My Emails has a simplified user experience with large visual assets and touch targets that provide context about your emails at a glance. You can use one finger to swipe to the next message or act on a message, or use voice commands for touch-free email triage. The experience provides images of the people who sent you the emails in a bright and bold way so you can quickly identify the sender, or don’t look at all – just listen!

New user experience - Play My Emails

Play my emails delivers a seamless experience with Bluetooth-enabled wireless or wired audio devices such as headphones or your car audio. When you reply and provide a quick response to an email, the mic on your phone is used. It’s helpful to know that the controls on headphones with playback options such as Forward or Back can also be used to skip to new messages in your inbox. The microphone on our iPhone will only engage when you say “Hey Cortana” during the playback of your emails and when Cortana finishes reading out an email and listens for voice commands.

Following our initial launch of Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS, we plan to add functionality specifically designed for the new Surface Earbuds. In addition to the immersive sound offered by the Earbuds to listen to your emails, we’re bringing the software capabilities into Outlook to simplify the set up for Bluetooth Low Energy that offers increased battery life and enhanced voice input via the Surface Earbuds microphone.

Play My Emails - Designed for when you're on the move

Not just text-to-speech, it’s AI

What makes Play My Emails transformational is the intelligent technology that is used to read out your emails. Let’s watch this video so you can learn how Cortana personalizes the experience by keeping you in the center of the conversation.

Play My Emails starts with a summary – how many emails are new in your Focused Inbox in the last 24 hours and are there changes to your day? It’s helpful to know out of the gate if you’ll have time to listen to all your new emails as Cortana estimates the time it will take to read them out to you.

Based on Outlook’s integrated Calendar, Cortana first reads out messages that help you stay organized such as updates to scheduled events. Perhaps more importantly, Cortana also identifies if you now have a conflict in your schedule due to the changes that may have just landed in your inbox.

Keeping you at the center of the experience means that Cortana knows where you are in time and relative to when your inbox was updated with each message. The readout does not just provide you with the email timestamp however. Your personal assistant let’s you know how long ago, whether just a few minutes ago, about an hour ago, you received each email “An hour ago, you received an email from…”

With information from Microsoft Graph, Cortana identifies the sender of each email in relationship to you, such as your manager, or if was sent to a distribution list and how many people are included in the recipient list. You see, this experience is not just a readout of the text in your inbox, it about how the intelligent technology gives more context that is relevant to you. Cortana synthesizes the information in the message header and meta data and marries it with the insights about you and information from apps and services that power Office 365. This provides a more meaningful and contextual readout.

The Play My Emails experience is like having a conversation with your personal assistant. If you have a series of messages that are part of a conversation but arrive in your inbox at disparate times, Cortana stitches them together in a logical sequence and reads them out to you in a way that gives you the full context of the conversation in one connected experience. This helps you get caught up on the whole thread in a way that feels natural.

And a conversation with your personal productivity assistant should be just that, a two way, private conversation. As mentioned, the microphone on your iPhone is only used when you’re using Play My Emails. You can say “Hey Cortana” to interrupt the readout and provide simple commands or reply to a message with a short, dictated response.

Catch up with what's new in your inbox during your commute

You don’t need to lose time if the content of a message is full of graphical information, or is a long one and you don’t have time or the inclination to hear it out. Conversely, if emails contain information you should be aware of such as an attachment, links, embedded files or bulleted lists, Cortana will let you know which emails are better read on a screen or you can chose to act on important ones straight away. You can flag for later, skip or archive emails just like you can with your customizable swipe options in your Outlook inbox. Most of the swipe options available in Outlook for iOS Settings are supported and mirrored in the Play My Emails interface so swiping left or right to triage your email when using Play My Emails is consistent and takes advantage of your muscle memory.

In the beginning

The genesis for this capability came from the opportunity to explore how to design for things we cannot see. Microsoft embarked on a user-centric research project to find out what goes on behind the scenes for people who are sight impaired. Either figuratively or literally, how do you get oriented, through voice, when you might not have visual landmarks? So if you are visually impaired or even situationally blind, for example when you’re walking or driving or otherwise distracted, what is input is required to accomplish tasks such as reading your email. Through this research Microsoft learned the essence of what input or information is important to get to what is truly meaningful. This project involved volunteers from the school of the blind so we could learn the tactics when translating their needs to voice enabled capabilities.

Play My Emails - when your eyes and hands may be busy with other things

Outlook is all about helping you organize your life, stay in control of your day and on top of what matters. Using intelligent technology to get things done fast and with reduced the effort so you can get time back in your day and spend it with people that matter most to you. That includes getting time back when you need to stay on top of your personal communications and commitments. Cortana is your personal productivity assistant now built into Outlook. This represents a significant shift in how you interact with your inbox.

Play My Emails is starting to roll out today and may take several weeks to reach all US customers. Once it’s available to you, please share with us what you think. This is a significant step in our journey and we plan to bring more voice capabilities and enable deeper conversations between you and Outlook. Looking forward, we expect to expand specific time management scenarios, include more emails and enable additional actions in your conversations with Cortana. In the meantime, learn about other exciting Microsoft 365 AI innovations and other announcements we’re making at our Microsoft Ignite 2019 Outlook sessions.
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Read more: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...ay/ba-p/930243

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Brink · Nov 4, 2019

Outlook mobile for iOS and Android is rolling out Dark Mode Mobile

Today we are starting to roll out dark mode in Outlook for iOS and Android. For added comfort or when a bright screen may not be appropriate, we’re bringing people the choice and flexibility to adapt their experience with a simple and powerful Microsoft 365 Dark Theme experience.

Outlook for Android and iOS

Adapting to work life flow, Outlook focuses its design on the context of where people want to use Dark Mode. When asked, people found the experience comfortable and aesthetically pleasing while keeping their email and calendar content crisp and clear. This way, Outlook helps you stay connected and organized so you can get things done wherever you are such as dimly lit living rooms, home offices or airplanes.

This experience is in keeping with other modern apps that aim to ease viewing and reduce eye strain. And, to help optimize battery life, once iOS and Android devices support dark themes*, Outlook plans to automatically switch to Dark Mode based on their device settings in addition to Outlook in-app options.

It’ll take several weeks to complete the full roll out of Dark Mode in Outlook for iOS or Android worldwide. Download the app today and keep your app up to date so once it’s available to you, you can share feedback with us by visiting Outlook.UserVoice. To learn more about the Microsoft 365 cross-company design approach to Dark Mode, refer to this article in Medium by Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft.

*When iOS 13 and Android Q are available, Outlook is planning to automatically switch to dark theme based on those settings.
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Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...es/ba-p/813738

Download:

(Android) Microsoft Outlook | Google Play

(iOS) Microsoft Outlook | Apple App Store

Brink · Nov 4, 2019

Dark theme is coming to Gmail for Android and iOS Mobile

Quick launch summary

Earlier this year, we launched the new Gmail on mobile to help you get things done quickly, such as viewing attachments or searching for a specific email.

We’re further enhancing the Gmail experience on Android and iOS devices by introducing dark theme support. Dark theme will begin rolling out today—for details on how to configure dark mode once it’s rolled out to your device, see below.

How to enable dark theme in Gmail on Android:

To enable dark theme on Android 10:

In your Android Display system setting, set your device to dark theme—Gmail will automatically respect the system default setting.

On Pixel, when Battery Saver is enabled, Gmail will default to dark theme automatically.

Or, in Gmail go to Settings > Theme and select “Dark".

How to enable dark theme in Gmail on iOS:

For iOS 11 or 12, enable dark theme by going to Settings > Dark Theme.

To enable dark theme on iOS 13, you can:

Set your device to dark theme in iOS Settings, and Gmail, by default, will automatically respect the system default setting.

Or, in Gmail go to Settings > Theme and select “Dark”.

Availability

Rollout details

Android 10: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on September 24, 2019

iOS: Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on September 24, 2019

G Suite editions

Available to all G Suite editions

On/off by default?

This feature will automatically respect the system settings in Android 10 and iOS 13.

Dark theme can also be enabled within the respective Gmail app settings.

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Source: G Suite Updates Blog: Dark theme is coming to Gmail for Android and iOS

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Steve C · Nov 4, 2019

Outlook Mail for Android

What about viewing your Outlook calendar?
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After more fiddling I decided to use Gmail since I can control the push frequency. I'm using Outlook for contacts and calendar which works provided you designate the Outlook account for contacts and enable synchronisation for contacts.

Android GMail app for IMAP accounts, Gmail & Outlook email. Installed Outlook app but only the Microsoft email account is enabled.

Built in Contacts app used linked to Outlook account as default

Android Outlook app used for Calendar and built in Calendar app disabled.

Windows 10: Introducing Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS and later for Android

Introducing Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS and later for Android

Introducing Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS and later for Android

Introducing Play My Emails in Outlook for iOS and later for Android

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