The headquarters of Microsoft Philippines in Makati City. Art Fuentes, ABS-CBN News
MANILA - Windows 11 is getting a major upgrade as Microsoft rolls out its Copilot artificial intelligence into the operating system and its suite of productivity apps for free starting Sept. 26.
Copilot uses similar tech from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has become hugely popular due to its capabilities to mimic human creativity and expertise.
At an event in New York, Microsoft said Copilot will be freely available in Windows 11, in Microsoft 365 apps, the Edge web browser with the Bing search engine and chatbot.
“Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront,” the tech giant said in a statement.
The generative AI will be part of over 150 new features that will come in an update of Windows 11.
“With the convergence of chat interfaces and large-language models, you can now ask for what you want in natural language, and the technology is smart enough to answer, create it or take action. At Microsoft, we think about this as having a copilot to help navigate any task,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft.
The company said the new features will allow users to create faster, complete tasks with ease and lessen the cognitive load thus “making once complicated tasks simple.”
There will be new AI capabilities in Paint and Photos, a modernized File Explorer, and new natural voices in Narrator to enhance accessibility and productivity.
Microsoft Word users will be also able to add custom graphics to their documents using Designer–a feature that will also come to other 365 apps.
Users of Edge and Bing will get personalized answers generated based on the chat history, and improved DALL.E 3 model from OpenAI in Bing Image Creator. They will also be able to add an invisible digital watermark to all their AI-generated images in Bing, including the time and date it was originally created., Microsoft said.
The tech giant is also integrating AI into its enterprise services, and launching new Surface devices.