Microsoft updates Copilot with new features and a friendly, laid-back demeanor

Earlier this week, Microsoft published a blog post outlining the new features coming to Copilot as part of the assistant's most recent update. The post opens with a message from Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI's EVP and CEO. There, Suleyman reminds us that technology is not always about building bigger. Sometimes, he tells us, technology is as much about feeling as it is about innovation, and this is especially true when considering that technology "is, and must always remain, in service to humanity".

With this message, Suleyman is setting the tone for the next stage of Microsoft's AI products, including Copilot. His message describes Microsoft's plans as working to usher in"a calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before." The message is unexpectedly refreshing in a context where competing has largely become a matter of building larger, running faster, and ever-climbing benchmark scores, all aspects far removed from values such as being truly useful or aligning with users' interests and needs.

Instead, Microsoft pledges to focus on privacy, security, transparency, and consent to build truly personalized assistants that go beyond problem-solving and truly support users on the things that are important to them. The first step towards this goal is the introduction of Copilot Voice, Daily, Discover, and Labs, as well as specific features for Copilot on Microsoft Edge. As its name states, Copilot Voice unlocks the possibility of having spoken conversations with the assistant, giving users four voices to choose from. The feature will initially be available in English in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Copilot Daily brings personalized news and weather summaries to Copilot in a straightforward format. Users can choose to receive reminders about upcoming news, and all content is pulled from authorized sources, namely, publishers with which Microsoft has paid agreements. These include Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst Magazines, USA TODAY Network, and Financial Times, with plans to subsequently grow the number of sources. The Personalized Discover feature complements Daily nicely by offering custom suggestions for conversation starters and guiding users to Copilot's newest features. Daily will roll out in the US and the UK first, with more countries upcoming.

Copilot on Microsoft Edge brings some of Copilot's most useful capabilities, like answering questions, summarizing page content, translating text, or rewriting a sentence, right to the address bar, where Copilot can be invoked with @copilot. This is very similar to a recently introduced Gemini integration into Chrome which allows users to call Gemini from the Chrome address bar with @gemini.

Finally, Microsoft announced the launch of Copilot Labs, an experimental playground for the company to test features before general availability. The first two features released under Copilot Labs are Vision and Think Deeper. The general idea behind Vision is to enhance Copilot with the capability to understand what users see in their screen, and answer questions or make suggestions based on the screen's content. The feature is reminiscent of the vision capabilities originally showcased by OpenAI with its Advanced Voice Mode, which are still not available and have no potential release date.

Initially, Copilot Vision will be available on Microsoft Edge, where it will be an opt-in feature, and will not store user data for any further purposes like model training. Due to safety concerns, it will work on a limited list of popular websites, and excludes all paywalled and sensitive content. The feature will be available through Labs for a select number of US-based Copilot Pro users. The Think Deeper feature lets Copilot take more time before responding to some queries, and enables the assistant to reconstruct the steps it took to reach its answer, much like OpenAI's o1 does. Think Deeper will be available through Labs this week for some English-speaking Copilot Pro customers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.