Microsoft announced its plan to bring AI into its Windows operating system as an assistant to users on common tasks.
Beginning in September 2023 Microsoft will offer an update to Windows 11 allowing users to access a new icon for an AI Copilot that will work across many of its functions.
This Copilot has at its heart OpenAI’s ChatGPT engine which is powering much of the strategy across many of Microsoft’s offerings.
Microsoft bet heavily on OpenAI with as much as $13 billion (yes, that is billion with a ‘B’) and a host of uses and plans that focus on the concept of Copilots.
Copilots will soon be available for Windows Office products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
But this new announcement hints that AI will be a fundamental part of Windows itself at the core of all Microsoft-powered PCs.
Windows Copilot will enable users to request functions on the system setup using generative AI prompts and interactions with responses coming in the form of suggestions that take you right to the function in question.
Users will also be able to cut and paste between various applications using Copilot and have the AI engine review and summarize documents.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine was an early benefactor of the OpenAI partnership, and with Windows Copilot users will be able to invoke Bing in the background to provide better contextual responses using information from the Internet.
The idea of a virtual assistant inside of Windows is not new (who can forget Clippy the friendly paperclip), but all other iterations of virtual helpers have failed for the simple reason that they really weren’t that helpful.
But Microsoft is betting large that AI will prove the solution to this.
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