Microsoft Build 2024, a major event for the Redmond-based tech giant, announced a number of new features on Tuesday, including updates to its AI chatbot Copilot, new Microsoft Teams tools, and more.
The event marked yet another sign of the direction tech is headed. Everything is centered on AI these days — Google even joked about it during their recent I/O event — and Microsoft is no exception.
Here’s everything announced at Build 2024, along with links and details to learn more about the headlines of the day.
Team Copilot
Team Copilot is a new AI feature that you may start seeing in your Microsoft Teams meetings.
Credit: Microsoft
Microsoft boasts that Team Copilot is an AI co-worker of sorts who can drop in on your video calls. It can summarize the discussion and make sure each topic on the agenda has decent pacing time-wise. Plus, all participants can edit Team Copilot’s notes, adding or removing the outline as they see fit. Team Copilot can also make an appearance in chats, answering users’ questions and getting latecomers up to speed with past discussions.
It’s also worth noting that Copilot made a splash during the Surface event on Monday, which introduced two laptops: Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11. These devices have Copilot and AI at the forefront, including a new feature called “Recall” that tracks everything you do on your PC — and lets you retrieve it at any time via natural language with a scrollable timeline.
Microsoft Edge real-time translation for videos
Microsoft announced a new AI feature for its Edge browser: real-time translation for videos.
Credit: FellowNeko / Shutterstock.com
It can dub and add subtitles to select videos. For example, if someone is hard of hearing, they can use this feature to caption videos that didn’t have captions initially. This is also useful for users who want to watch videos in a different language. So far, supported videos include content from YouTube, LinkedIn, and even Coursera.
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New Microsoft Teams features
Microsoft also introduced a handful of new features for Microsoft Teams, the company’s Zoom competitor.
Credit: Microsoft
This includes Intelligent Recap (AI-driven meeting notes) and the use of custom emojis that users can upload for themselves.
Copilot AI chatbot assists you by watching your screen
Microsoft debuted a feature where its AI assistant can — if the company’s demo is to be believed — walk you through a task by watching your screen. The demo showed Copilot helping someone learn how to play the game Minecraft. As Mashable’s Alex Perry wrote, this was a curious choice considering Minecraft is a game mainly played by small children.
Regardless if anyone needs this feature, we now have it.
Copilot Agents, an AI business assistant
Microsoft unveiled Copilot Agents, AI assistants that promise to “independently and proactively orchestrate tasks for you.” In other words, they’re AI assistants you create to do background work to help you get your job done more efficiently. Microsoft used onboarding a new employee as one such task.
Copilot Agents seem a heckuva lot like Google’s recently announced “AI Agents.” Google showed off the planned feature at its I/O event earlier this month.
Don’t rush off to try Copilot agents just yet, however. It’s not yet released and there is only a planned public preview later this year.
What GPT-4o can do on Azure AI
Microsoft announced at Build that OpenAI’s multimodal model GPT-4o was now available to developers on Microsoft’s Azure AI.
If you’re a normal person just existing in the normal world, you’d be forgiven if that sentence is quite confusing. As Mashable’s Cecily Mauran wrote, “Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio is a playground for developers,” and now GPT-4o is one of the tools available to developers. That gives developers access to the new model’s image and vision capabilities, which is definitely a huge step forward.
Microsoft demonstrated several ways to use GPT-4o throughout the presentation, which Mauran covered in further detail.
