Microsoft strengthens Office Word and Co. with AI features – you should know that

A little over a month ago, Microsoft massively upgraded its search engine Bing with artificial intelligence and a chatbot à la ChatGPT and blew up the hunt for Google. Now the world’s largest software group is following suit and expanding its Office programs with AI features.

What exactly changes?

Extensive artificial intelligence functions will be integrated into the office applications, CEO Satya Nadella announced Thursday in Redmond.

The “Microsoft 365 Copilot” allowed users of Office programs to take advantage of the new AI features that have been making waves in the IT world and beyond for months.

The programs include the word processor Word, the presentation software PowerPoint, the spreadsheet Excel and the e-mail and calendar program Outlook.

The Microsoft executive led the announcement with the legendary presentation of the graphical user interface by computer scientist and inventor Doug Engelbart (1963) and with the premiere of the first iPhone (2007).

Why is this important to Microsoft users?

Never despair of the perfect wording of an important business email again? Don’t want to waste hours creating PowerPoint presentations?

“This will fundamentally change the way we work and unleash a new wave of productivity growth,” promises Nadella. With the new “Copilot for work”, Microsoft is empowering people and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface – natural language.

So Nadella posed along Microsoft CEO Jared Spataro a new kind of business chat. This not only works with the data of a public AI language model, but also accesses personal data such as calendar entries, emails, chats and other documents of the users.

“It allows you to do things you’ve never been able to do before,” Spataro promised. You can give the program verbal instructions, such as, “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy.” The software then creates an appropriate status update based on the meetings, emails, and chat histories on the topic.

Why is Microsoft doing this?

With the broad AI offensive, Microsoft is attacking Google’s previously untouched leadership in web search and online advertising. The integration of the text robot ChatGPT in Bing and the Microsoft Edge browser plays a key role in this.

With “Microsoft 365 Copilot”, the world’s largest software group wants to secure and further expand its supremacy in the field of office software.

The technology used by Microsoft is based on the GPT-4 language model, which was only presented to a wider audience on Wednesday by the Californian start-up OpenAI. GPT-4 would, among other things, yield better results than the previous variants and also understands visual content as input.

Microsoft executive Spataro emphasized that the “Microsoft Copilot” is more than OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is an “advanced processing engine that works behind the scenes” to combine the power of public language models with the Microsoft 365 apps and the data generated from them (“Microsoft Graph”).

When will it be available and how much can it cost?

Microsoft is currently testing Copilot “with 20 customers”, including some very large US companies. The tests would be expanded to other organizations “in the coming months”. However, the company is unwilling or unable to disclose when individual Microsoft 365 subscribers will be able to use the new AI features.

They’ll “share more about pricing and licensing soon,” which Ars Technica says suggests there could be a paid add-on in addition to the cost of a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Microsoft is adding AI-powered features to all of its major products this year, most notably the Bing search engine, but also Skype and Windows 11. This is possible thanks to a multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI, the AI ​​company behind ChatGPT.

How does Google respond?

On Tuesday, Google announced it would be rolling out a range of new generative AI capabilities across its various workspace apps, including Google Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides.

The AI ​​features include new ways to generate or summarize texts and collect ideas with AI. Thanks to the AI, full emails can then be generated in Gmail based on short bullet points.

The head of Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, emphasized that data protection is strictly ensured when sensitive data of companies is integrated. Customers could use encryption methods with their own key, so that Google itself could not access the data. The customer data would also not be mixed with the data pool for the Google public search.

Google’s text robot is called “Bart”, but unlike ChatGPT, it is not yet available to the general public.

Google has not yet announced prices for the AI ​​interfaces and development kits on Tuesday. These will be published at a later date.

Sources

(dsc/sda/awp/dpa)