Microsoft has updated its AI-driven offerings over the year, integrating artificial intelligence tools to Bing Search, Windows and its Office 365 suite of services that include Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams.
As Microsoft recently announce that it was unifying its AI services, including the Bing Chat AI chatbot, under a single umbrella of Microsoft Copilot.
Microsoft has now reveal a host of new features coming to Copilot in 2024.
In its blog post marking a year of Copilot, Microsoft said that it plans to add advance capabilities to the AI companion in the coming weeks.
Microsoft Copilot will soon be power by OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4 Turbo, which will enable it to perform more complex and longer tasks.
The Microsoft said the model was currently under testing with select users and will be integrate across Copilot services in the coming weeks.
This means the Microsoft Copilot AI companion (formerly Bing Chat) on Web, Windows, and other Microsoft services will run on GPT-4 Turbo.
Also Microsoft Copilot is also getting the new DALL-E 3 model for image generation, that will allow it to create richer images that better reflect user prompts.
The enhance image generation capabilities have been roll out and can be access by going to bing.com/create or asking Copilot to generate an image.
Microsoft also announce that Edge users would soon be able to write text based on Web pages.
With Inline Compose with rewrite menu, users could select a block of text on any Website and ask Copilot to rewrite it.
Microsoft is also expanding visual search capabilities by combining GPT-4 with vision with Bing image search and web search data.
This new feature dubbed Multi-Modal with Search Grounding, will feature better image understanding for user queries and will be available soon.
Finally, Microsoft is developing a Code Interpreter feature and a Deep Search tool for Bing.
The former will be able to perform more accurate calculations, coding, data analysis, visualization, math and more, Microsoft claim.
Microsoft is currently gathering feedback on Code Interpreter and intends to roll it out widely soon.
Deep Search will deliver optimise search results in Bing for complex topics.
Available as a button next to Bing Search bar, the tool will bring more relevant search results by expanding queries into more comprehensive descriptions.
In November 2023, Microsoft announce that its AI assistant Copilot, already available on Windows 11, would be coming to Windows 10.
Microsoft also launch its own custom-design AI computing chips, Maia and Cobalt, at its Ignite developer conference in November.
Microsoft Copilot was first integrate with Windows 11 as part of an update in September.
This update also brought AI features to Paint and Snipping Tool.
Microsoft’s Link to Windows app could turn your smartphone camera into a webcam for your PC
Microsoft Phone Link (formerly Microsoft Your Phone) is a useful utility, particularly if you own an Android 14-powered flagship smartphone.
This software includes the Link to Windows companion app for Android phones and the Phone Link app for Windows devices.
Developers of the Link to Windows app appears to be working on the new feature, as indicate by code discover by the people at Android Authority.
This new feature would enable you to utilize the Link to Windows app to use the camera on your smartphone as a webcam on your PC.
Although certain Link to Windows features are limit to particular devices, it’s unclear if this new capability will be available on all phones that have Link to Windows install.
There is code in Microsoft’s Link to Windows v1.23102.190.0 for Android app that indicates the corporation is working on enabling video streaming from your Android phone to your Windows PC.
This would enable it to function as a webcam.
Those strings suggest that users would be able to launch a camera stream that allows their phone’s camera to be accessible to their Windows PC once Microsoft’s Phone Link software is operational on both linked devices.
Although “webcam” is not mention in the strings directly, there are other hints that suggest the functionality is somehow connect to video calls.
Also there are new set of strings suggests that users could apply effects and auto-framing to the video stream.
It is more likely that the feature has something to do with webcam operation because “auto-framing” is a camera effect.
Auto-framing may be comparable with video calling apps like Facetime, Apple promote the “Center Stage” function, which allow the front camera to zoom in and maintain focus on people even while they move about.
