Last week, Microsoft rolled out some new features for Copilot aimed at assisting in professional task accomplishments, and this week it’s releasing a few consumer-focused gems for its AI platform.
While not a full overhaul of the pre-generative AI platform, Microsoft is rolling out a new look for Copilot that is more consistent with the newly espoused belief that the company is working on technology that evolves with the user.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman explains in a new blog post, “We are not creating a static tool so much as establishing a dynamic, emergent, and evolving interaction. It will provide you with unwavering support to help you show up the way you really want in your everyday life, a new means of facilitating human connections and accomplishments alike.”
As part of this new Copilot evolution, Suleyman and his team are rolling out Copilot Voice, Copilot Daily, Copilot Vision, and Think Deeper as a set of new features intended to make the company’s AI platform more engaging than the typical prompt and response interactions of competitor solutions.
As described in the blog post from Suleyman,
- Copilot Voice – is the most intuitive and natural way to brainstorm on the go, ask a quick question or even just vent at the end of a tough day. Your companion will be personal to you, with four voice options to choose from.
- Copilot Daily – helps you kick off your morning with a summary of news and weather, all read in your favorite Copilot Voice, with more options like reminders of what’s coming soon. Microsoft is working with third party news sources such as Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazine, and Financial Times to fill out this feature.
- Personalized Discover – With your permission, Copilot will basically coalesce info from other Microsoft connected properties to deliver a more tailored users experience based on their historical interactions across other apps, services, and platforms.
- Copilot in Microsoft Edge – Microsoft once again over engineered the Copilot experience in Edge by giving users yet another way to access Copilot outside of the embedded chat window during a search and the icon that appears in the right pane of the browser. Now users can access Copilot directly from the Microsoft Edge browser by simply typing @copilot into the address bar.
- Copilot Labs – Copilot Labs gives people the opportunity to test out our experimental features that are still in development. It’s a chance to give feedback and help shape the experiences we create. This new feature gives way to two new features Microsoft is looking to bring to the platform soon that include Copilot Vision and Think Deeper.
- Copilot Vision – In what has the potential to be another Recall-level security scandal, Microsoft’s Copilot Vision sees what you see and can talk to you about it in real time. It understands the web page you’re viewing, both text and images, and can answer questions about its content, suggest next steps and help you without disrupting your workflow. Microsoft assures users that:
- Copilot Vision sessions are entirely opt-in and ephemeral.
- The experience won’t work on all websites
- Copilot Vision won’t work on paywalled and sensitive content for this preview.
- There is no specific processing of the content of a website you are browsing, nor any AI training.
- Before we launch broadly, we’ll continue to take feedback on all the above from early users in Copilot Lab
- Think Deeper – Copilot can now reason through more complex questions. Think Deeper takes more time before responding, allowing Copilot to deliver detailed and step-by-step answers to challenging questions. We’ve designed it to be helpful for all kinds of practical and everyday challenges, like comparing two complex options side by side.
Suleyman’s post comes at the beginning of the month Microsoft is scheduled to release the preview of its AI-powered Windows search feature Recall, as well as a handful of other Copilot-led experiences such as image upscaling in the Windows Photos App, expanded image editing, generative fill, and more.
October is shaping up to be a big month for Copilot development for Microsoft.
