Microsoft is infusing artificial intelligence tools into its Office software, including Word, Excel, and Outlook email.
The company said Thursday that the new feature, named Copilot, is a processing engine that will let users do things like summarize long emails, write stories in Word and animate slides in PowerPoint.
Microsoft is marketing this feature as a tool that will allow workers to be more productive by freeing up time they usually spend in their inbox or making it easier for them to analyze trends in Excel.
The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant will also add a chat feature called Business Chat, which resembles the popular ChatGPT. It takes commands and performs actions – like summarizing an email about a particular project to colleagues – using user data.
“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” said the Microsoft CEO. , Satya Nadella, in a press release.
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Mattel, Instacart and other companies have also integrated generative AI tools like ChatGPT and the Dall-E image generator to come up with ideas for new toy cars and answer customer food questions.
Microsoft rival Google said this week that it is integrating generative AI tools into its own Workspace apps, such as Google Docs, Gmail and Slides. Google says it will roll out the features to its “trusted testers on a rolling basis throughout the year.”
Microsoft spokeswoman Jessica Dash said the new Office features are currently only available to 20 enterprise customers. It will be rolling it out to more enterprise customers over the next few months.
The announcement came two days after OpenAI, which powers the generative AI technology Microsoft relies on, rolled out its latest AI model, GPT-4.