Microsoft on Thursday announced its latest plans to put AI within the hands of more users, responding to a series of hits this week by its rival Google with updates to its own widely used office software.
The tech company unveiled a recent AI “co-pilot” for Microsoft 365, its suite of products that features Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails.
Open to select business customers for the primary time for testing, the AI will offer a draft of those apps, speeding up content creation and freeing up worker time, Microsoft said.
The Redmond, Washington company, which has surpassed its competitors with its investment in ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, has also unveiled a recent “business chat” experience that may fetch data and perform tasks in various applications on the user’s written command.
“We imagine the subsequent generation of AI will unleash a recent wave of productivity growth,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a live-streamed presentation.
This week’s news reel, including recent funding for startup Adept AI, reflects how firms large and small are embroiled in fierce competition to deploy software that may change the best way people work.
The main target is on Alphabet, the owner of Microsoft and Google, which on Tuesday touted artificial intelligence features for Gmail and a “magic wand” for editing prose in its own word processor.
The opportunities presented by each Microsoft and Google are similar.
The frenzy of investing and constructing recent products began with last 12 months’s launch of ChatGPT, a sensational chatbot that showed the general public the potential of so-called big language models.
Such technology learns from past data to create content anew, powering Microsoft’s recent co-pilot together with other business data and applications.
The sort of artificial intelligence can also be developing rapidly. This week, OpenAI began releasing a more powerful version often called GPT-4, which is included in a chatbot in Microsoft’s updated Bing search engine.
In one among the corporate’s biggest updates on Thursday, Microsoft said that AI could open up the computational magic of its Excel spreadsheet software – long the domain of trained analysts – to any one who is ready to describe the calculations they need in plain text.
Microsoft also said the AI can summarize email threads and virtual meetings that happen within the Teams collaboration software, similar to the AI-created live notes that Google demonstrated to reporters this week.
Microsoft’s recent business chat could also answer a matter like, “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” taking cues from morning emails, meetings and chat threads, the corporate said.