Co-pilot and other incarnations of AI

The company spent most of the event talking about artificial intelligence and Copilot. Bing AI is an assistant that is somewhat similar to a chatbot but has much broader functionality. Microsoft plans to integrate this into all its products, especially its office suite. Copilot is planned to be rolled out to a wider range of users as part of the upcoming Windows 11 update 26 September.

Presentation of new features of Windows 11, including Copilot: video

• First of all, Copilot will be built directly into Windows. A new button will appear on the taskbar.
• The co-pilot can be controlled via voice, text alerts or mouse clicks.
• There are many options for using the technology, the company showed a few of them. In the ad, the user uses AI to turn on dark mode, arrange windows on the desktop, get a summary of the article in the browser, command to remove the background from the photo, and continue editing in Paint (which will now have its own generative AI, with layers and transparent backgrounds). the ability to work with a plan), create a playlist based on your mood on Spotify, and much more.
• Copilot was also seen scanning a lengthy email and extracting relevant information about restaurants within walking distance of the event venue. Another demo showed how Copilot solves and explains a math equation by simply drawing it with a stylus.
• The assistant will be able to extract context from your phone. For example, Copilot may obtain data about your flight by reading information in an SMS message you receive from the airline.
• A shopping-oriented version of Copilot is also on the way.

In fact, Microsoft has integrated Copilot with the entire operating system, allowing AI to access information from apps, personal data, email, search, and more. This effectively makes it a personal virtual assistant rather than a regular chatbot.

Dall-E 3

The company also talked about DALL-E 3, artificial intelligence for creating images based on text description. It is now integrated into the visual creation tool of the Microsoft Bing search engine.

The quality of the results is much better than the previous generation, at least in these demo versions, and Microsoft says images will be digitally watermarked as if they were created by AI so that no one will mistake them for human-made works of art.

Microsoft 365 Chat

Copilot started as an AI assistant for Office applications. Microsoft’s new version, which covers almost all its corporate tools, stands out with a new chatbot called Microsoft 365 Chat. The company uses it to store all your emails, texts, files, meeting requests, shared documents, etc. It bills itself as an assistant that reads, gives you a brief, summarizes, prioritizes, and gives you a compact overview of where you’re best spending your time.

AI can already write blog posts and articles, but it often produces mixed results that need to be edited. But 365 Chat is said to improve results by allowing you to connect directly to Office documents, from Word files to Excel spreadsheets, and get the information you need from them.

The smartest potential use is the “speak like me” feature, which allows it to write emails that mimic your personal style (in Outlook, of course), making AI-generated emails less artificial.

Surface Laptop Go 3

Since this event was also dedicated to hardware, specifically the Microsoft Surface PC series, there was also a discussion about new devices. They are mostly top-notch and quite expensive computers.

Surface Laptop Go 3 / Photo from Microsoft

First up was the Surface Laptop Go 3, a relatively budget-friendly 12.4-inch touchscreen laptop designed for portability, which means it should be fairly lightweight.

• It has a 12th generation Intel Core i5 processor onboard. Microsoft claims it’s 88% faster than the original Surface Laptop Go from three years ago. It is not known how much of an increase there is compared to last year’s model.
• The third generation promises up to 15 hours of battery life.

Its price is $799, which does not indicate very high performance, which will be enough for educational purposes, for example.

Surface Laptop Studio 2

At the top is Surface Laptop Studio 2. Microsoft says this is the most powerful Surface ever made.

Surface Laptop Studio 2 / Photo: Microsoft

• It has a 13th generation Intel i7 H-class processor and a choice of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 or RTX 4050 GPU.
• You can also get up to 2TB of storage and 64GB of RAM.
• Surface Laptop Studio 2 has a 14.4-inch touchscreen with a 120 hertz refresh rate.
• The screen can be tilted forward to cover the keyboard.
• There’s also an intriguing trackpad that features some of Microsoft’s accessibility-focused adaptive mice, as well as a microSD card slot.
• It is noteworthy that the Surface Laptop Studio 2 has a separate neural processor that can manage artificial intelligence functions. Microsoft claims this is the first Intel NPU in a Windows laptop.
• The company offers the Surface Slim Pen 2, which comes with a pen.

Surface Laptop Studio 2 will be available on October 3. Its price starts at $1,999.