Microsoft has given its Copilot artificial intelligence chatbot a makeover and a series of new features. The updates come as the company unveils its first Super Bowl ad in four years.
The 60 second spot leans heavily into the capabilities of Copilot, showing a series of people explaining what they do with Copilot from making images to creating a 3D open world game.
Upgrades to Copilot go beyond what is also available in ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot that shares the same underlying AI model and show Microsoft trying to differentiate its offering.
One of the biggest changes is upgrades to Designer, the AI image tool powered by DALL-E, adding the ability to edit existing images in addition to creating pictures from scratch.
What can we expect from Copilot?
Microsoft has gone “all-in” with its Copilot brand, adding the AI technology to Windows, 365, its enterprise products and as a standalone platform — seen in the new Super Bowl spot.
To warrant the hype it is building for the AI product Microsoft has given Copilot a new look with a cleaner website and app interface, and easier to understand example prompts.
The website version of Microsoft Copilot also includes a new notebook interface that lets you take notes and have AI expand on them. A quick way to get thought down on screen.
What are the new image editing features?
Being able to generate images using a large language model chatbot is particularly useful as you can describe exactly what you need and collaborate with the AI to improve the output.
Microsoft is taking that to a new level with the ability to edit an existing image through Desiger, the Copilot--powered AI image editor..
You can also customize generated images within the chat by highlighting any element of the picture to enhance the color, blur the background or re-imagine that aspect of the wider picture.
Do you need a Copilot Pro subscription?
All of the above is available in the free and Pro versions of Copilot, including a new Designer GPT, a custom chatbot focused solely on image generation and manipulation.
However, if you want to resize or regenerate images between square and landscape shapes you will need to pay the $20 a month for Pro. You will also get more high-priority generations per month with Pro than free and access to the latest underlying OpenAI model GPT-4-Turbo.
Microsoft says the past year there have been five billion chats and five billion images created, first with Bing Chat, then in Edge and now across the entire Copilot family.
This update is the latest in the growing AI chatbot battle for dominance between Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. It is also incredible to see how far this entirely new type of product has come from the experimental release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
