Wednesday, 7 February 2024, Bengaluru, India
Microsoft’s Copilot line of AI-powered chatbots and personal assistants is receiving updates with a spectacular Super Bowl LVIII advertising campaign.
(Image Source: Techcrunch.com)
Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi, described what users may anticipate in a post on the company blog.
He commented, “Today is exactly one year since we launched our AI-powered experiences for Bing Chat users.” Over 5 billion chats and 5 billion photos have been created on Copilot, demonstrating the explosive growth in usage of our experiences over that year. We are now bringing possibilities with Copilot, our unique offering for anyone seeking to maximize their potential with AI creation.
Along with a more “streamlined look and feel,” Mehdi added, the Copilot experience on the web, Android, and iOS now includes an enhanced AI model called Deucalion. This consists of a cleaner answer style and a carousel of suggested prompts to feed Copilot, such as “How would you explain AI to a sixth grader?”
Meanwhile, Copilot’s Designer, a program that uses generative AI models like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 to convert prompts into graphics, now includes additional editing features.
The ability to alter photos in-line during a chat session has been extended to all English-speaking Copilot users in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, India, and New Zealand. This includes the ability to colorize objects, blur backgrounds, and alter the overall look of the image (such as turning it into pixel art). Additionally, Microsoft’s $20/month Copilot Pro premium service users can resize and regenerate photos between portrait and landscape formats.
Designer GPT, which will provide a more “immersive, dedicated canvas” inside Copilot where users can “visualize their ideas,” is expected to launch soon, according to Mehdi.
Malevolent users, primarily from the image board 4chan, utilized Designer to make explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift and disseminate them on X (previously Twitter), which created quite a stir earlier this year. Microsoft said that the Designer had safeguards to stop inappropriate prompts. Still, users discovered bugs like misspelled names and descriptions of images that produced the same effect without using explicit sexual language.
Microsoft announced last month that it has closed the Designer loopholes by prohibiting the creation of celebrity photos. However, much like any other GenAI technology, vendors and dishonest people will probably engage in a never-ending game of cat and mouse.
Mehdi said, “Microsoft’s AI innovations align with our company mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.” “We’re democratizing our AI breakthroughs with Copilot to help everyone realize the promise of AI.”
Mehdi ignored the Copilot Pro performance problems, a frequent grievance among early users.
Even under peak usage, Copilot Pro is meant to provide priority access to the underlying OpenAI models that enable Copilot. However, users have reported coping with abnormally long generation times and other, possibly related issues. Insufficient server capacity is Windows Central’s best guess as to the cause of the problem, but with the official word, it’s easier to say for sure.
To sum up, incorporating design-focused features into Copilot by Microsoft marks a substantial advancement in improving user experience and platform productivity. Microsoft’s initiative involves integrating innovative design elements, including intuitive interfaces and streamlined workflows, to empower users with a more visually pleasing and user-friendly environment. The infusion of design thinking into Copilot goes beyond mere aesthetics and highlights Microsoft’s commitment to enhancing functionality and efficiency within the tool.
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
