Tag: copilot

Weekend roundup: Resurrected Clippy, ChatGPT Business and AI Oreo ads

Microsoft wants to put up a nice face for you to talk to with Copilot.

Clippy much? Microsoft launches visualization of Copilot
If you ever use voice mode in Copilot, which Microsoft hopes to expand, you might see a new, expressive animation on your screen. That would be the newly announced «Mico.» Unlike the much maligned Clippy, Mico will use facial expressions that change as you talk. It’s only available in the US, and will work with an upcoming memory feature for Copilot to better respond to requests.
More at: Microsoft’s launch, The Verge and Ars Technica.

OpenAI announces ChatGPT Business
ChatGPT will now combine all the context of your businesses’ connected apps, like Slack, Sharepoint, Github and Google Drive. This makes it possible to ask pretty detailed questions about your business and have comprehensive answers delivered in one place — without the need to go searching through lots of different repositories. The feature is available tor Business, Enterprise and Education customers starting last Thursday.
More at: OpenAI’s launch page, The Verge and The Register.

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Weekend roundup: Copilot everywhere, Veo 3.1 and Altman on morality

Microsoft wants to reimagine the whole PC experience to something you simply speak to.
Microsoft wants Copilot to listen for your prompt and interact with your screen, coming soon to Windows 11. (Picture: Microsoft)
Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC
The next revolution for Microsoft is putting the Copilot bot front and center in its operating system. Any Windows 11 PC will now be listening for the «Hey Copilot» prompt and you won’t be needing a Copilot Plus PC to engage with it. This will be across apps and settings and Windows 11 should simply «understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that.» The spooky part? They want Copilot to read your screen to interact with you.
More at: The Verge, Engadget and The Windows Blog.

Anthropic introduces «Skills»
The new feature across all of their apps is basically a memorized workflow, or folders of actions that Claude can use to remember how to do things. That means you can store a collection of prompts or actions within the app and have it used at a later stage, which can come in handy for tasks used often. It works across apps, so you can store instructions from Excel plotting to brand guidelines. And it’s scriptable, too, so you can save complete routines.
Read more: Anthropic’s launch page, writeup at The Verge.

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Friday roundup: A good week for coding, speech models

Coding and speech models grab the headlines for this weeks roundup.
Both OpenAI and Microsoft are out with speech-to-speech models this week. (Picture: OpenAI)
OpenAI makes Realtime API generally available
The agentic Realtime model is a native speech-to-speech model that can be used to make customer service agents, phone reps and voice navigation features. It doesn’t go through speech-to-text and text-to-speech loops and generates audio «directly through a single model and API.» OpenAI is marketing this to developers who want more natural flowing speech, and it’s not available as distinct model in ChatGPT – yet. You can hear it and see it in use at places like Zillow, T-mobile, StubHub and Oscar Health, though. With general availability, it will surely show up in a lot more places soon.
More at: OpenAI’s launch page, discussion on r/OpenAI.

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Microsoft Research: These are the jobs most vulnerable to AI disruption

There's a direct comparison between tasks performed by AI and the actual jobs that do them, says Microsoft.
Microsoft produces a big, scary list. (Picture: Adobe)
The company behind the Copilot chatbot has compared the tasks most frequently performed by AI to actual jobs doing the work.

The result might not be all that surprising, as AI is used the most to solve issues in translation, communication and writing — and is least used in areas such as construction and other manual labor.

Data is from 2024
From studying some 200,000 anonymized copilot sessions in the USA during 2024, Microsoft has been able to produce a list of the 40 most vulnerable jobs — and the 40 least affected ones.

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Microsoft launches experimental Copilot Mode for Edge

Copilot mode in Edge feels like they just moved the icon to the address bar.
Edge’s new Copilot Mode doesn’t do much just yet, and isn’t agentic.
It’s still a little rough around the edges, is not agentic and can’t support doing tasks.

The idea of turning on Copilot Mode is to get it involved in your tabs and research, to distill info from web pages and do basic tasks.

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With help from top AI labs, American teachers to get better, free training

AFT, the teacher's union is partnering with Big AI for better training on ethical classroom use.
ChatGPT usage is way up in K-12 schools, and now teachers are getting a leg up in how to use it better. (Picture: Wesley Fryer, CC BY 2.0)
With help and funding from Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, the American Federation of Teachers hopes to educate 400 000 teachers across the USA in ethical AI use in classrooms.

The program will begin right away with virtual, online training for all 1.8 million members of the union, and in New York City with a «three-day training session, including six hours of AI-focused material that highlighted practical, hands-on ways to marry the emerging technology with established pedagogy.»

Already used by a fourth of students
According to the latest data, from February 2025, 79% of teens said they had heard about ChatGPT, while 26% admitted to using it in schoolwork — and there are a plethora of other tools available.

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Short Friday news roundup

Atari 2600 from 1977 beats Microsoft's chatbot in chess.
This piece of 1977 hardware hardly broke a sweat beating Copilot in chess. (Picture: Wikipedia)

TikTok gets a taste of racist Veo 3-generations
Racist and dehumanizing Veo 3 videos aimed at blacks and immigrants are raking in millions of views on TikTok, MediaMatters reports.
The videos depict black people as monkeys with warrants, decries missing parents and calls them «the usual suspects.» Some of these 8-second videos, complete with watermarks, had 3 to 4 million views at the time they were discovered.
— We proactively enforce robust rules against hateful speech and behavior and have removed the accounts we identified in the report, many of which were already banned prior to the report publishing, says TikTok in a statement to Mashable.

For higher engagement, Meta’s chatbots will reach out first
Users of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram could soon receive unprompted messages to ask about recent conversations, according to leaked documents seen by Business Insider. This is intended for bots made in Meta’s AI Studio, which lets users create custom chatbots. These will remember past chats and preferences, and will «follow up with you to share ideas or ask additional questions,» says a Meta spokesman.

Microsoft’s Copilot also sucks at chess
After first brimming with confidence and promising a «strong fight,» claiming to think 10-15 moves ahead, «remember previous moves and maintain continuity in gameplay» and that «our match should be much smoother» against the Atari 2600 chess simulator from 1977, Copilot went the way of ChatGPT by failing miserably in their game. By the seventh turn, it had lost two pawns, a knight and a bishop, while the Atari had only lost a single pawn. It went south from there, as reported by The Register.

AI use to become mandatory at Microsoft division

A bellwether for the industry as a whole? Microsoft division mandates AI use.
Usage of AI will become part of permanence reviews at this Microsoft division. (Picture: Ryan Vaarsi, CC BY 2.0)
The developer tools division head at Microsoft, Julia Liuson, recently sent out a memo to managers bluntly saying that «Using AI is no longer optional.»

— AI is now a fundamental part of how we work, she wrote. — Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.

Employee evaluations should now include their use of AI tools, she says, and managers are rushing to find a formal metric to measure it.

Internal performance requirements at Microsoft vary from team to team, and this is just one division. But it shows how quickly companies are adopting the technology.

Across all of Microsoft, it is estimated that 30% of all coding is already done by AI.

Go read the full scoop at Business Insider, the discussion on r/Singularity, and check out Tag: Work

Microsoft: 81% of SMBs see 2025 as pivotal year for AI at work

Microsoft says AI will upend the workplace, and it will happen sooner than you think.
Microsoft says AI will upend the workplace, and it will happen sooner than you think. (Picture: Joe McKendry/Microsoft)
People are overworked and under pressure to produce ever more, Microsoft’s new «2025 Work Trend Index» report finds.

Enter AI agents to alleviate the press, they say, and 79 % of leaders concur. Most are now planning to use AI to boost productivity within the next 12 to 18 months.

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Copilot labs show off new, playable Quake II levels

A picture of the AI rendered, playable Quake II.
Miss Quake II? Now you can play new levels generated by AI. (Picture: Screenshot)
Amid Ai fears in the gaming industry, replete with layoffs and questions about artistry in the age of AI, Microsofts Copilot labs has offered a glimpse into what the future of gaming might look like.

They spent only just over a week on training to produce a real time game model of Quake II, says Tom’s Hardware, that now plays a somewhat choppy 10 frames per second or so version of the game — with new, never before seen gameplay, generated on the fly.

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