What Microsoft showed at the Surface and AI event
The baton of presentations was passed to Microsoft. Earlier, we wrote about Apple’s big presentation, where, among other things, the new iPhone 15 was unveiled. Microsoft also held an event dedicated to new Surface products and artificial intelligence. They showed us new laptops, told us more about the Copilot service, and didn’t forget about office programs and more.
Copilot and other artificial intelligence implementations
The company spent most of the event talking about AI and Copilot. It is an assistant that is somewhat similar to the Bing AI chatbot, but with much broader functionality. Microsoft plans to integrate it into all of its products, especially the office suite. Copilot is expected to become available to a wider range of users as part of the Windows 11 update to be released on September 26.
Presentation of new Windows 11 features, including Copilot: video
- First of all, Copilot will be built right into Windows. The new button appears on the taskbar.
- Copilot can be controlled by voice, text queries, or mouse clicks.
- There are many options for using the technology, and the company showed several of them. In the commercial, the user uses AI to turn on the dark mode, organize windows on the desktop, get a summary of an article in the browser, give a command to remove the background from a photo and continue editing in Paint (which will now have its own generative artificial intelligence, the ability to work with layers and transparent backgrounds), create a mood-based playlist in Spotify, and much more.
- They also showed how Copilot scans a long email and extracts relevant information about restaurants within walking distance of the event venue. Another demonstration showed how Copilot solves and explains a mathematical equation by simply tracing it on the screen with a stylus.
- The assistant will be able to extract context from your phone. For example, by reading the information you receive from the airline in an SMS message, Copilot can get your flight details.
- A shopping-oriented version of Copilot is also on the way.
In fact, Microsoft has integrated Copilot with the entire operating system, giving AI access to information from applications, personal data, email, search, and more. This makes it a personal virtual assistant, not just a chatbot.
Dall-E 3
The company also talked about DALL-E 3, an artificial intelligence for generating images from text descriptions. It is now integrated into the image generation tool of the Microsoft Bing search engine.
The quality of the results, at least in these demos, is much better than the previous generation, and Microsoft says that the images will be digitally watermarked as created by artificial intelligence so that no one will confuse them with human-made artwork.
Microsoft 365 Chat
Copilot started as an AI assistant for Office applications. Its new version, which covers almost all Microsoft enterprise tools, stands out with a new chatbot, simply called Microsoft 365 Chat. The company presents it as an assistant that reads all your emails, texts, files, meeting requests, shared documents, etc., provides you with a summary, summarizes, prioritizes, and gives you a compact overview of what you should spend your time on.
AI can already write blog posts and articles, but with ambiguous results that often need to be edited. However, it is claimed that 365 Chat will improve its results by allowing you to directly link to Office documents, from Word files to Excel spreadsheets, extracting the information you need from them.
The most clever potential use is the “sound like me” feature, which allows it to write emails (in Outlook, of course) that mimic your personal style, so that emails created by artificial intelligence won’t seem artificial.
Surface Laptop Go 3
New devices were also discussed, as this event was also dedicated to hardware, in particular, the Microsoft Surface line of PCs. They are mostly premium and quite expensive computers.
The first to be shown was the Surface Laptop Go 3, a relatively budget-friendly 12.4-inch touchscreen laptop designed for portability, meaning it should be quite lightweight.
- The 12th generation Intel Core i5 processor is on board. Microsoft claims that it is 88% faster than the original Surface Laptop Go from three years ago. It is not known what the increase is compared to last year’s model.
- The third generation promises up to 15 hours of battery life.
The price is $799, which hints at not very high performance, which is enough, for example, for educational purposes.
Surface Laptop Studio 2
At the highest level is the Surface Laptop Studio 2. Microsoft claims that this is the most powerful Surface it has ever created.
- It has a 13th-generation Intel i7 H-class processor and a choice of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 or RTX 4050 graphics processor.
- You can also get up to 2 TB of storage and 64 GB of RAM.
- Surface Laptop Studio 2 has a 14.4-inch touchscreen display with a refresh rate of 120 hertz.
- The screen can tilt forward to cover the keyboard.
- In addition, there’s an intriguing trackpad that seems to incorporate some of the features of Microsoft’s accessibility-focused adaptive mouse, as well as a microSD card slot.
- It is noteworthy that Surface Laptop Studio 2 has a separate neural processor that can control artificial intelligence functions. Microsoft claims that this is the first Intel NPU in a Windows laptop.
- The company offers the Surface Slim Pen 2 with a stylus.
Surface Laptop Studio 2 will be available on October 3. Its price starts at $1,999.
This time, the company did not update the classic Surface Pro tablet with a keyboard cover or the Surface Studio, a universal desktop computer with a large movable screen that has not seen updates for several years.
