For better or worse, Microsoft has dragged its new Copilot UI to its Edge browser as it rolls out the updated AI experience to the web.
Microsoft recently updated its Copilot AI chat experience on desktop and mobile with a new bubbly and streamlined UI that emphasizes more consumer-friendly interactions equipped with prompt suggestions, a ‘discover more’ section, topics, daily recaps, and more.
Another change to the Copilot experience is the omission of the Compose box which has been replaced by a ‘Message Copilot’ section. While the Compose and Message sections effectively allow users to craft prompts for Copilot, the Compose box offers extra features such as directing the AI on the tone, format, and a preview of the response.
The new UI is being rolled out to Edge users on the Stable release on Windows 10 and 11 and shows up right where the old Copilot experience rested, in an expanded sidebar under the Copilot icon.
While some may argue the new Copilot UI experience has been dumbed down by Microsoft when compared to the old, it does open and delivers responses much quicker than it used to.
In addition to rolling out this new browser-based experience, the Copilot team is also teasing Copilot Vision coming to Microsoft Edge in new preview releases. Copilot Vision isn’t functional yet, even in the preview roll out, but there is a prompt explaining how it will work when it does.
Adding Copilot to Edge is yet another individual pillar of Microsoft’s contextual AI efforts that were sidelined when the company recalled Recall. As with most AI efforts, the pre-generative platforms do not understand what’s being done on a computer but with Copilot Vision, it will now have greater context for answers.
Microsoft hasn’t talked about when Copilot Vision will come to the desktop or browsers yet.
