An AI companion for everyone

Source: Microsoft Hong Kong

We’re living through a technological paradigm shift. In a few short years, our computers have learned to speak our languages, see what we see and hear what we hear.

Yet technology for its own sake counts for nothing. What matters is how it feels to people and what impact it has on societies. It’s about how it changes lives, opens doors, expands minds and relieves pressure. It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

And yet technology is, and must always remain, in service to humanity: an enabler and a path to deepening our common bonds and shared understanding, our energy and imagination, our creativity and our capacity for everything from invention to forming relationships.

In the field of AI, we often get caught up in the technical details. We spend our time talking about parameters and compute. The focus is on training runs, datacenters and the latest techniques. This is natural and inevitable when operating on the frontiers of something new, where the details do really matter. But I think it’s important that in doing all of this, getting stuck right in the technical weeds, we don’t lose sight of not only what we are building, but why we are building it.

At Microsoft AI, we are creating an AI companion for everyone.

I truly believe we can create a calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before. Great technology experiences are about how you feel, not what’s under the hood. It should be about what you experience, not what we are building.

Copilot will be there for you, in your corner, by your side and always strongly aligned with your interests. It understands the context of your life, while safeguarding your privacy, data and security, remembering the details that are most helpful in any situation. It gives you access to a universe of knowledge, simplifying and decluttering the daily barrage of information, and offering support and encouragement when you want it.

Over time it’ll adapt to your mannerisms and develop capabilities built around your preferences and needs. We are not creating a static tool so much as establishing a dynamic, emergent and evolving interaction. It will provide you with unwavering support to help you show up the way you really want in your everyday life, a new means of facilitating human connections and accomplishments alike.

With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. It’ll be an advocate for you in many of life’s most important moments. It’ll accompany you to that doctor’s appointment, take notes and follow up at the right time. It’ll share the load of planning and preparing for your child’s birthday party. And it’ll be there at the end of the day to help you think through a tricky life decision.

Some people worry that AI will diminish what makes us unique as humans. My life’s work has been to ensure it does precisely the opposite. We choose what we create. This is something we must do together. Our task is to ensure AI always enriches people’s lives and strengthens our bonds with others, while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

This is a new era of technology that doesn’t just “solve problems,” it’s there to support you, teach you and help you. In this sense, Copilot really is different from that last wave of the web and mobile. This is the beginning of a fundamental shift in what’s possible for all of us. It’s a long journey that will take years. With our latest updates to Copilot, you are seeing only the first careful steps in this direction.

Patience and care with our deployments are at the very foundation of our approach. My commitment is to be accountable at every stage, work with you and listen to you. Respect and deep compassion for our users and for society is the core purpose behind everything we do. It comes first. This is a journey we promise to take together. I couldn’t be more excited to embark on it with you.

Mustafa Suleyman, Executive Vice President and CEO of Microsoft AI

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From Microsoft Copilot Team

Our refreshed Copilot is focused on delivering a more intuitive design with more digestible, speedy and fluent answers. It now adapts to you with a warm tone and a distinct style, providing not only information but encouragement, feedback and advice as you navigate life’s everyday challenges — no matter how big or small. For example, in addition to helping you plan that big trip.

And we’re adding advanced capabilities like Voice and Vision that make it both more useful and feel more natural. These modalities change how we connect with technology, enabling people to seamlessly reflect with, learn from and work with their Copilot companions.

Copilot’s next phase

Today, we’re beginning to roll out the updated Copilot, including new and enhanced features:

Copilot Voice: We’re making it easier than ever to connect with your companion using Copilot Voice. This is the most intuitive and natural way to brainstorm on the go, ask a quick question or even just vent at the end of a tough day. Your companion will be personal to you, with four voice options to choose from.

Copilot Daily: Copilot Daily helps you kick off your morning with a summary of news and weather, all read in your favorite Copilot Voice, with more options like reminders of what’s coming soon. It’s an antidote for that familiar feeling of information overload. Clean, simple and easy to digest. Copilot Daily will only pull from authorized content sources. We are working with partners such as Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA TODAY Network and Financial Times, and plan to add more sources over time. We’ll also add additional personalization and controls in Copilot Daily over time.

Personalized Discover: Not sure where to start? Copilot Discover helps you get going, offering both a handy guide to its useful features and conversation starters, making jumping in simpler than ever. With your permission, these jumping off points are customized based on your interactions with other Microsoft services and will be further personalized over time according to your conversation history.

Copilot in Microsoft Edge: Copilot has been built right into your Microsoft Edge browser, quickly helping answer questions, summarize page content, translate text or rewrite a sentence. Now it’s even easier to access Copilot directly from the Microsoft Edge browser by simply typing @copilot into the address bar.

Copilot Labs: Copilot Labs gives people the opportunity to test out our experimental features that are still in development. It’s a chance to give feedback and help shape the experiences we create. We have two features we’re bringing to Labs initially, Copilot Vision and Think Deeper.

Copilot Vision: This is a profoundly new way of interacting with a computer. Copilot Vision sees what you see and can talk to you about it in real time. It understands the web page you’re viewing, both text and images, and can answer questions about its content, suggest next steps and help you without disrupting your workflow. Imagine you’re trying to furnish a new apartment, Copilot Vision can help you search for furniture, find the right color palette, think through your options on everything from rugs to throws and even suggest ways of arranging what you’re looking at.

Safety and security are our top priority here:

• Copilot Vision sessions are entirely opt-in and ephemeral. None of the content Copilot Vision engages with is stored or used for training — the moment you end your session, data is permanently discarded.

• The experience won’t work on all websites because we’ve taken important steps to put boundaries on the types of websites Copilot Vision can engage. We’re starting with a limited list of popular websites to help ensure it’s a safe experience for everyone.

• Copilot Vision won’t work on paywalled and sensitive content for this preview. We’ve created it with both users’ and creators’ interests top of mind.

• There is no specific processing of the content of a website you are browsing, nor any AI training. Copilot Vision simply reads and interprets the images and text it sees on the page for the first time along with you.

• Before we launch broadly, we’ll continue to take feedback on all the above from early users in Copilot Labs, refine our safety measures and keep privacy and responsibility at the center of everything we do. Let us know what you think!

Think Deeper: Copilot can now reason through more complex questions. Think Deeper takes more time before responding, allowing Copilot to deliver detailed and step-by-step answers to challenging questions. We’ve designed it to be helpful for all kinds of practical and everyday challenges, like comparing two complex options side by side. Should I move to this city or that? What type of car best suits my needs? And so on. It’s an early Copilot Skill that’s still undergoing development, so we’ve placed it in our experimental Copilot Labs to test and get feedback.

We’re also making sure Copilot is easily available on all our platforms. On Copilot+ PCs and Windows we’re putting Copilot just a click away, unlocking new ways to interact with your PC. Check out today’s announcement on the latest with Copilot+ PCs and Windows.

Our work toward creating these kinds of experiences goes much further than just Copilot. Bing, Edge and MSN will also be more personalized, visual, cohesive and useful experiences than ever. For example, Bing generative search goes beyond simply finding an answer. Instead, it understands the search query, reviews millions of sources of information, dynamically matches content and generates search results on the fly.

While still under development, you’ll notice generative search rolling out across Bing starting today. To explore generative search in the U.S., simply search “Bing generative search” to choose from a selection of demo queries. We are also launching a new experience where users can more easily trigger Bing generative search for informational queries.

The refreshed Copilot is rolling out today on iOS and Android, through the Copilot web experience at copilot.microsoft.com and in Windows. We’re also excited to start rolling out Copilot to WhatsApp to help users there experience natural and engaging interactions with Copilot.

Notes:

• Copilot Voice is initially available in English in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Copilot Voice will expand to more regions and languages soon.

• Copilot Daily is rolling out from today starting in the United States and the United Kingdom with more countries coming soon.

• Personalization in Copilot follows our Microsoft Privacy Statement, and people can opt out at any time in Settings. We’re still finalizing options for offering personalization to users in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom.

• Copilot Vision is rolling out to Copilot Labs soon and will be available to a limited number of Copilot Pro subscribers in the United States.

• Think Deeper starts to roll out this week through Copilot Labs to a limited number of Copilot Pro users in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.