Microsoft Build kicks off today, and it’s shaping up to be a big AI-focused event. The company has made several announcements about how it will expand its use of AI across its apps and services, including Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and more.
If you want to keep up to date, we’ve rounded up the top stories from the event for you below.
Microsoft is bringing its AI personal assistant, called Copilot, to Windows 11. This is the same assistant that Microsoft is already integrating across Edge, Office apps, and GitHub.
However, Windows Copilot will live inside the taskbar. Clicking it opens Copilot’s sidebar, where you can ask it to summarize, rewrite, and annotate text in any of the applications you use, as well as adjust your computer’s settings. Microsoft says it will start publicly testing the feature next month before rolling it out to more users.
There are also some small updates coming to Windows 11, including support for Bluetooth LE, the low-energy audio specification that lets you listen to high-quality audio without draining your device’s battery life. Microsoft is also adding support for ten new languages and dialects in Live Captions, its feature that transcribes audio in real time, as well as Windows 11’s native RGB controls.
Microsoft had some big news to share regarding 365 Copilot: the addition of plug-ins. The AI assistant will now support three main types of plug-ins, including Teams messaging extensions, Power Platform connectors, and tools that use technology from ChatGPT. You’ll also be able to choose from dozens of third-party plug-ins, like those from Atlassian and Adobe.
In addition, Microsoft says it will build all plug-ins for Copilot and Bing Chat with the same standard that OpenAI uses for ChatGPT. This means that you will be able to use the same plugins across all three AI tools, and developers will also have an easier time creating them.
Microsoft is bringing 365 Copilot to Edge. The tool, which will live inside your browser’s sidebar, can use the content on the site you’re viewing to help you work on projects in Microsoft 365 apps, such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and more.
For example, the tool should help you do things like draft an email, add data to a spreadsheet, create status updates based on conversation threads, and more. The integration will also support the aforementioned plugins coming to 365 Copilot.
Windows Terminal gets an AI-powered chatbot with its integration with GitHub Copilot. Developers using GitHub Copilot can now use a chatbot directly within Terminal to take various actions, get code recommendations, and explain errors. Microsoft also says it is exploring bringing GitHub Copilot into other developer tools such as WinDBG.
But this isn’t the only developer-focused update that Microsoft has announced. It also introduced a new Dev Home Control Panel that should make it easier to set up and use Windows dev devices. In addition, Microsoft brings AI-generated app review summaries to the Microsoft Store and offers an AI Hub to highlight Windows apps that use AI.
With Microsoft investing billions of dollars in OpenAI, it’s no surprise that OpenAI would make Bing the default search engine in its ChatGPT chatbot. Starting today, ChatGPT Plus users will start seeing quotes served by Bing appended to chatbot responses.
While Microsoft previously announced that it would be rolling out OpenTable and WolframAlpha plug-ins for Bing, it’s greatly expanding the suite. Bing will soon support plugins from Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Redfin, TripAdvisor, Zillow, and more.
