Microsoft is adding ChatGPT-like features to its Office programmes after adding them to its Bing search engine. Among the new features are the ability to generate Outlook emails, summarise Teams meetings, and create Word documents nearly entirely from scratch.
Microsoft has unveiled an AI “work copilot” that can write your emails and help you to make up on missed meetings.
The ChatGPT-like assistant will be available in all of Microsoft’s Office programmes, including Word, Teams, and Outlook.
A video of the bot summarising calls, taking notes during meetings, and answering questions about what people said during them was shown.
Creating PowerPoint presentations based on information in another document, generating emails for event invitations, and analysing big volumes of data in Excel spreadsheets were additional required.
Copilot will also be available in a special Teams conversation, where users may ask more general work inquiries, such as summarising a group of emails or beginning to write a project plan.
“It will change the way we work,” said executive Jared Spataro.
The disclosures came at an event hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
‘Mitigations in place’ in case AI fails
Microsoft stated that the new functionality would be rolled out to a small number of clients at first, and that Copilot would most certainly make mistakes, as these AI models have in the past.
They are characterised as large language models because they can understand and make human-like responses after being trained on massive amounts of text data.
Nonetheless, they have been proven to struggle with distinguishing between good and wrong, and will typically reply confidently in either case.
According to Microsoft, Copilot has been thoroughly tested and will be regularly evaluated and enhanced during its rollout.
“We have mitigations in place when the system gets things wrong, has biases, or is exploited,” asserted the firm’s head scientist Jamie Teevan.
The AI arms race is heating up.
It comes after Microsoft made a multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT’s inventor, OpenAI, with its latest GPT-4 model already being integrated into the company’s redesigned Bing search engine.
Bing’s chatbot was temporarily disabled last month following allegations that it was giving customers highly dubious responses and answers, including whining about poor news coverage about itself.
Google said earlier this week that it would be integrating its own generative AI to workplace apps such as Gmail.
The search engine just unveiled Bard, its answer to ChatGPT.
AI investment is also on the rise in China, where Baidu, a Google-like search company, unveiled its own ChatGPT-like assistant called Ernie last night.
