Microsoft has a new voice and vision for Copilot
Future Developments of the Copilot Experience: Mobile, Web, and App-On-Demand Experiments, and Twitter Expectations
Notepad is a weekly newsletter written by Tom Warren and covers Microsoft’s bets on computing, gaming, and artificial intelligence. Subscribe to get the latest straight to your inbox.
While the new Copilot is a good addition, Microsoft is still working on its vision of an artificial intelligence companion for everybody, which involves adding voice capabilities that are very similar to what Openai has already done. You can now chat with the AI assistant, ask it questions, and interrupt it like you would during a conversation with a friend or colleague. Copilot now has four voice options to pick from, and you’re encouraged to pick one when you first use this updated Copilot experience.
Today’s Copilot experience will be available in the mobile app and on the website as well as through the Copilot Windows app. Copilot Voice will be initially available in English in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US, before expanding to more regions and languages in the future. Copilot Daily is limited to the US and the UK before it expands elsewhere, and Copilot Vision will be limited to a number of Copilot Pro subscribers in the US.
Microsoft is putting Think Deeper into Copilot Labs, a new way to test out experimental features that the company is still developing. Copilot Vision will also be part of the Labs feature initially, and participants will be able to provide feedback on the experiences. Microsoft is clearly treading carefully with Copilot Vision after the backlash around its initial Recall security and privacy issues. Microsoft revealed last week that there is an improved security andprivacy option in Recall, and you will be able to uninstall or not turn it on if you so choose.
This next phase of Copilot also includes Copilot Daily, an audio summary of news and weather that Copilot reads out as if it were a CNN anchor. It’s designed as a short clip you can listen to in the mornings, and it only uses content from news and weather providers that have authorized Copilot to use their content. Microsoft is working with a number of publications, with plans to add more over time.
Microsoft says that no content from the Copilot Vision sessions is stored or used for training. This new experience won’t work on all websites yet because Microsoft has put restrictions on the types of websites Copilot Vision works with. Copilot says that it will start with a few popular websites to make sure it is safe for everyone. Copilot Vision won’t work on paywalled and sensitive content during preview.
The Amazing Transition Point: Microsoft’s CEO says, “It’s not like I’m here to tell you what I saw”
We really are at an amazing kind of transition point. AI companions now see what we see, hear what we hear, and speak in the same language that we use to communicate with one another.
Microsoft’s CEO says that the company is at an amazing kind of transition point. “AI companions now see what we see, hear what we hear, and speak in the same language that we use to communicate with one another.”
The Clippy was the best known of Microsoft’s helpers because it appeared when users opened Word with a line saying “It looks like you’re writing a letter…” The program failed to deliver on the humanlike intelligence promised, and Microsoft decided the product was unpopular due to this. Large language models are far better at mimicking human intelligence, but their behavior can still be odd and unpredictable, which may prove a factor in Copilot’s popularity.
“One of the things that seems to be most common is that people ask it for aesthetic advice,” Suleyman says. “They’re on a fashion website, and they’re like, what do you call that pattern? What do you mean by that dress?
DeepMind Founder and CEO, Over Microsoft Teams, discusses Go-playing with a Superhuman Companion (with discussion)
As a cofounder of DeepMind, a British company acquired by Google in 2014, he helped devise a new way for computers to tackle seemingly impossible problems by combining practice with positive and negative feedback. DeepMind demonstrated the approach by developing a superhuman Go-playing program, AlphaGo, which defeated the world’s best Go player in 2016.
It is part of a plan to get users to fall in love with the PC. He spoke to Will Knight from Redmond, Washington, over Microsoft Teams. The conversation has been lightly edited.
There is this new sort of design material that is actually about persistence, about relationship, about emotion. The experiences I create are about having lasting, sustained interaction with a companion.
Microsoft focused on building supportive and empathising artificial intelligence, where you joined. It seems like you brought that with you to your new job.
That’s the beauty of this technological moment. To get to know your companion over a long period of time and engage in one of these experiences. It’s teaching you and encouraging you. I don’t think that will feel like a computer anymore.
There’s just so many little moments when you’re sitting at your computer. It’s amazing to have an artificial intelligence companion who can see and talk to you in real time. It sort of changes the route that you take through your digital life, because you don’t have the burden of having to type something in.