Microsoft announced this Tuesday, October 1, that it wanted to reinforce the use of artificial intelligence (AI) among the general public with the deployment of the latest version of Copilot, its conversational agent now capable of exchanging and interpreting images.
A former manager at one of the pioneers of AI, Google DeepMind, Suleyman was hired by Microsoft last March to head its consumer AI division. The group positioned itself very early in the technological field, benefiting in particular from its partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
It has now been overtaken by Google and soon by Apple, which are taking advantage of their dominant position in the smartphone market to promote their own artificial intelligence products, Gemini on Android and Apple Intelligence. For its part, Meta takes advantage of the popularity of its social networks to promote its Meta AI Conversational Agent.
The AI will “see” what the user sees
According to Microsoft, Copilot’s voice features should allow the user to interact more naturally with the AI, which will offer four different voices. The deployment will initially take place in English-speaking countries and the interpretation of the images is still in the testing phase. The group assured that data protection would be at the center of its concerns and that data used in image interpretation would be deleted after use.
In theory, AI will “see” what the user sees on a page and will be able to “answer questions about the content, suggest next steps, and assist you without interrupting your work.” The feature will start with “a limited list of highly used sites to ensure the experience is safe for everyone,” Microsoft said.
The group also added another functionality, called “deep thinking,” that allows Copilot to solve more complex problems, reprising an existing functionality for the o1 model developed by OpenAI.
Microsoft added that it wants to make Copilot more customizable “based on [l’]conversation history”, a possibility that, however, will not be implemented in the European Union and the United Kingdom, due to stricter data protection regulations.
Source: BFM TV
