Microsoft Teams meetings now available in Apple’s CarPlay

by Jonny Evans · September 27, 2021

iOS 15 sees a series of improvements to CarPlay, but one of the most useful of these comes from Microsoft, not Apple: support for Teams meetings in CarPlay.

Microsoft Teams comes to Apple’s CarPlay

We all spend a lot of time in meetings, and sometimes we try to take part in these from our car. Microsoft knows this and has introduced Teams integration to CarPlay in the latest app update. With 250 million daily active users on all platforms, support for Teams is a good move given how many of us use our cars for business (assuming we can find the fuel).

To keep you safe while driving, you don’t get video you just get access to the audio through your car’s system, but this does at least mean you won’t need to pull over for the next team meeting.

You enable this in Settings.

Car-related improvements in iOS 15

There are a range of additional car-related improvements in iOS 15, including:

Announce messages in CarPlay:

Siri will automatically announce incoming messages in CarPlay. You can set this up to always happen, or just enable this feature for specific drives, such as when waiting for an important message. Rather than having Siri announce all your messages, you may want to link important communications up with the VIP system or iPhone Favorites in your iPhone

Road level view in Maps:

New Maps features (will) include improved driving with a new 3D road-level view  for complex intersections in the US. Other features include an interactive view, AR walking directions, and improvements to transit and more.

UWB support for car keys:

Apple continues to expand this feature, which will let you lock and unlock your car and start it, without needing to take your iPhone out of your pocket, thanks to UltraWideband. Apple has also created a system to let you add key fob controls from compatible manufacturers to your Wallet, giving you remote keyless entry controls for cars.

Driving in Focus:

Apple’s Focus offers a Driving integration which replaces Do Not Disturb Whle Driving with more nuanced controls, which you can set to turn on automatically when you connect to your car’s Bluetooth system or use CarPlay. Use this to reduce notifications to the bare minimum.