Microsoft announced that its Copilot AI assistant has received a major overhaul, gaining voice and vision capabilities. Copilot also now has a virtual news reader mode to present headlines, as well as the ability to see what you see and to interact in a more conversational manner. Before a general release, these tools will be trialed among a subset of Copilot Pro users “to gather feedback” and make them “better and safer.” Microsoft AI Executive VP and CEO Mustafa Suleyman says the changes herald “a calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.” Continue reading Microsoft’s Copilot AI Assistant Update Adds Voice and Vision

Microsoft has begun the release of Bing generative search, making it available for “a small percentage of user queries.” The company says it will solicit user feedback and undertake further testing prior to a broader rollout. Google began dabbling in what it called the Search Generative Experience last summer, then upped the ante by adding a search-optimized version of its Gemini model this spring. The journey was not without controversy, something Microsoft will surely try to avoid. Microsoft says its new AI-driven search functionality “combines the foundation of Bing’s search results with the power of large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs).” Continue reading Microsoft Testing Bing Generative Search for User Feedback

San Francisco-based OpenAI revealed it is currently testing SearchGPT, a prototype of new AI search features that provides “fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.” The testing arrives as similar technology is made available by leading search services Google and Microsoft Bing. The SearchGPT prototype, featuring a user interface similar to that of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and virtual assistant, launched last week to a group of 10,000 test users and publishers who will be tapped for feedback. The plan is to iterate an improved version and then integrate SearchGPT directly into ChatGPT, although no timeline was provided. Continue reading OpenAI Begins Testing Prototype of New AI Search Features

Meta Platforms is bringing its Meta AI assistant to Quest 3 headsets in the U.S. and Canada. As part of the company’s ongoing collaboration with Microsoft, Quest 3’s Horizon OS will also get access to real-time information courtesy of Bing search. The update will also bring Meta AI with Vision — already integrated with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — to Horizon OS, initially just in passthrough mode. “These changes will begin rolling out in the U.S. and Canada in experimental mode next month — and we’ll continue to improve the experience over time,” Meta explains. Continue reading Meta Brings AI Assistant, AI Vision to Some Quest Headsets

Microsoft is enlarging its family of generative Copilots, introducing new AI assistants in its collaborative Teams and SharePoint platforms. Team Copilot expands Copilot beyond the sphere of personal assistant, empowering it to work on behalf of a team with the goal of improving collaboration and project management. Team Copilot will have agents that provide the ability to orchestrate and automate business processes, as well as extensions and connectors designed to make it easy to tailor and extend Copilot to meet specific business needs. Copilot is also launching in preview for all Azure customers. Continue reading Microsoft Adds Copilot AI Assistants to Teams and SharePoint

GitHub Copilot Enterprise is being released for general availability for $39 per month. Calling the tool GitHub’s “most advanced AI offering to date,” the company says it can be customized to an organization’s knowledge and codebase, placing “the institutional knowledge of your organization at your developers’ fingertips.” Infusing GitHub Copilot Enterprise throughout a company’s software development lifecycle lets team members “ask questions about public and private code, get up to speed quickly with new codebases and build greater consistencies across engineering teams” while ensuring everyone access to the same standard codebase. Continue reading GitHub Copilot Enterprise in General Release at $39 Monthly

The Browser Company, which last year issued an iPhone web browser called Arc, has now released Arc Search, which combines artificial intelligence functionality. The five-year-old New York-based company is stressing speed and an absence of clutter for its new search experience, which it concedes is still in “the earliest stages.” The main Arc Search feature is the AI-powered “Browse for Me,” which compiles results from at least six different sources into a summarized presentation informed by models from OpenAI and others. Basically, Browse for Me builds a mini webpage instead of just returning links with abstracts. Continue reading Browser Company’s Arc Search Uses AI to Upgrade Browsing

Microsoft Ignite 2023 was all about the transformative change of artificial intelligence, and the event was the setting for Bing Chat’s debut as Bing Copilot. The company also introduced three additional Copilot offerings: Copilot for Azure, Copilot for Service and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides. The new Copilot Studio gained tools for connecting Copilots in Microsoft 365 apps — including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the Edge browser and Windows — to third-party data. In addition, the company showcased software for client-configured chatbots, and introduced its first custom designed AI processor, the Maia 100 chip. Continue reading Microsoft Rebrands Bing as Copilot, Debuts First Custom AI

Microsoft says it will assume legal responsibility for commercial customers who get sued for copyright infringement as a result of the company’s AI Copilot product services. A new initiative called the Copilot Copyright Commitment is designed to provide peace of mind to Microsoft business users as more copyright holders challenge the handling of protected works by the companies building AI models. “If a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer” and pay any resulting fees, including settlements, Microsoft says. Continue reading Microsoft Copilot AI Customers Shielded from Legal Exposure

Google is making many of its most powerful cloud computing tools available commercially for the first time, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian shared at the company’s Cloud Next ’23 conference in San Francisco. In a bid to catch up with top AI rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, the Google Distributed Cloud will open for general business including at the edge with Vertex AI and PaLM 2. Google Cloud will serve up AI from Anthropic, in which it is an investor, as well as from Meta Platforms. In addition, an AI-infused Gmail productivity suite is on the way. Continue reading Google Takes on the Competition with Cloud and AI Services

Newsrooms can potentially benefit greatly from AI language models, but at this early stage they’ve begun laying down boundaries to ensure that rather than having their data coopted to build artificial intelligence by third parties they’ll survive long enough to create models of their own, or license proprietary IP. As industries await regulations from the federal government, The New York Times has proactively updated its terms of service to prohibit data-scraping of its content for machine learning. The move follows a Google policy refresh that expressly states it uses search data to train AI. Continue reading The New York Times Looks to Protect IP Content in Era of AI

Alphabet posted a strong second quarter, with Google Cloud revenue climbing 28 percent year-over-year, to $8.03 billion, and overall revenue gaining 7 percent, to $74.6 billion, exceeding analyst expectations, as did the $18 billion in net income. Google Search ad sales grew by nearly 5 percent, to $42.6 billion, while ad sales from Google’s YouTube streaming platform rose almost 4 percent, to $7.7 billion. YouTube had in recent quarters sustained revenue declines, attributed to increased competition from TikTok and others, but was finally able to reverse the downward trend. Continue reading Search Stays Strong and YouTube Rebounds in Alphabet Q2

Microsoft Cloud drove record sales and profits for Q2, which saw a year-over-year revenue gain of 8 percent to $56.2 billion for April through June. Net income topped $20 billion, a 20 percent gain that beat analyst expectations and the company’s own estimates. Microsoft Cloud revenue for Q2 was up 21 percent, to $30.3 billion. And the company is beginning to see the results of its investments in artificial intelligence. Q2 is Microsoft’s second record-setting quarter this year, topping the three-month high of $52.9 billion in Q1. The previous profit record was $18.8 billion in Q4 2021. Continue reading Microsoft Q2 Marks a Quarterly Sales Record of $56.2 Billion

Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing search engine has been drawing in excess of 100 million daily active users and logged half a billion chats. With OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 models driving the action, it has also created over 200 million images since debuting in limited preview in February. Seeking to build on that momentum, Microsoft is adding new features and integrating Bing more tightly with its Edge browser. The company is also ditching its waitlist in a move to open preview. “We’re underway with the transformation of search,” CVP and consumer CMO Yusuf Mehdi said at a preview event last week. Continue reading Microsoft’s Next Generation of Bing AI Interacts with Images

As Microsoft ushers in Kya Sainsbury-Carter to head its $18 billion digital advertising business, Bing Chat is joining her at center stage. The company has plans for generative AI to transform the category, including with paid links in chat results. Since February the company has been testing ads in Bing Chat searches. Microsoft hasn’t disclosed how many people are using the new Bing with AI chat, nor how many ads it has served. Bing Chat’s responses include footnoted links to resources amplifying the information in the chatbot’s conversational answers, but sometimes it links to paid search ads. Continue reading Microsoft’s Bing Chat Powers a New Approach to Advertising