During his keynote speech on the first day of Microsoft’s Build Developer Conference, Satya Nadella unveiled several innovative AI advancements that will soon become generally available to the public. The Build Conference is an annual event where developers are introduced to the most recent developments in Windows 11 and Microsoft 365.
One of the key announcements was the AI upgrade of a tool called Team Copilot. Launched by Microsoft in 2023, Copilot was a chatbot that provided intelligent support while using Microsoft 365 tools such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. The new AI upgrade expands the capabilities of Copilot, transforming it from a personal assistant into a team feature, which significantly improves collaboration and project management.
Team Copilot can manage agendas and take notes during meetings, highlight crucial information, track unresolved matters, and assign tasks. This feature makes it especially beneficial for teams using Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Loop, or Microsoft Planner.
In addition, Microsoft is introducing Copilot Studio, enabling the creation of custom copilots that function as independent agents once given instructions. These agents can automate long-term business processes, discern actions and user inputs, leverage memory to bring context, learn from user feedback, and record exception requests. One example of such an agent is the “order-taker” copilot, which can manage the entire order fulfillment process.
Microsoft also unveiled Phi-3 Vision, a 4.2B parameter multimodal model included in its Phi-3 family of small language models (SLMs). This low-cost, low-latency model has audio and vision capabilities and a 128k context window, designed for on-device solutions especially in areas with limited internet connectivity. It proves particularly useful for applications in healthcare, education, and agriculture.
Another noteworthy development is the Advanced Paste feature in Windows 11, providing smarter ways to copy and paste. With an OpenAI API key, users have more options for data copied to the clipboard. They can paste as plain text, markdown, or JSON, and can even type a description of how they want the copied text to be formatted before pasting. This feature saves users the hassle of pasting the text into ChatGPT, prompting it to format there, and pasting it back into their document.
All these announcements reflect the strides Microsoft is making in integrating AI into their software and providing more powerful, intelligent tools to their users. The company’s post on the unveiling of AI agents and multimodal Phi-3 at Microsoft Build 2024 emphasizes this commitment.
