AI and ChatGPT have quickly become buzzwords in the tech industry. Microsoft employed artificial intelligence to thrust Bing back into the spotlight earlier this year by introducing “Bing Chat.” Now, the company is enhancing Bing Chat, giving it a makeover to increase its similarity to ChatGPT, and broaden its capabilities. During the Microsoft Ignite event on Wednesday, the company revealed that Bing Chat and Bing Chat for Enterprise will be rebranded as Copilot.
Copilot was initially introduced as part of Windows 11, and although it is still in the preview stage, this feature brings a GPT-powered AI chatbot to computers. The company also revealed its first custom chips designed explicitly for AI – the Azure Maia AI Accelerator and Azure Cobalt CPU.
Copilot for Microsoft Applications
In conjunction with the rebranding announcement for Bing Chat, Microsoft also shared that it is enhancing Copilot for Microsoft 365 by introducing more personalization options. Users will soon have the ability to tailor their preferred formatting, style, and tone, initially within Word and PowerPoint and later extending to other applications.
In Teams, Copilot is set to get a handy new feature next year – the ability to take notes during meetings. Users can even instruct the assistant to include specific information, ensuring their co-worker’s comments make it into the meeting notes with a simple command like “Quote [co-worker’s name].” Copilot can assist on the fly during meetings without transcribing and organize Teams discussions on the Whiteboard for everyone to access. In Teams channels, Copilot becomes a useful tool for summarising lengthy posts or highlighting key events throughout the day.
Moving over to Outlook, Copilot will soon sift through invitation details, related emails, and important documents to create a quick event summary starting next spring. A soon-to-be-released Word feature will let users easily track document changes by asking Copilot questions like “How do I see what has changed in this document?”
In PowerPoint, users can leverage corporate brand assets and transform them effortlessly with AI-generated visuals.
Copilot relies on OpenAI’s latest models, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, with an assurance from the company that it would not store prompts and responses. Microsoft maintains a commitment to non-involvement in the interactions occurring within Copilot, emphasising that customers’ chat data will not be employed to further train the underlying models.
