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Major update for Microsoft Copilot: ‘Deep Search,’ Code Interpreter, more

Major update for Microsoft Copilot: ‘Deep Search,’ Code Interpreter, more

Microsoft has provided another update on its Copilot offering. What once began as Bing Chat, an AI-assisted search engine, has now expanded into a full-fledged AI assistant.

Earlier this week, EVP and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Medhi unveiled new innovations for Copilot. Several initiatives now fall under this moniker. The original Bing Chat was also renamed Copilot half a month ago, while the AI assistance within the Microsoft 365 suite was already known by that name.

The new capabilities lean firmly on key work OpenAI has done on its AI models. For example, the DALL-E 3 model now generates images that more closely match user input, and Microsoft is testing an integration of GPT-4 Turbo into Copilot, an LLM that is more proficient and efficient than previous variants.

Despite all the AI innovations to Bing, the search engine still holds a miniscule market share against Google Search. What’s striking is the next innovation Microsoft is adding soon: ‘Deep Search.’ It is said to combine Bing’s existing search functionality with the skillset of GPT-4, which should allow a user’s underlying intent to lead to better personalized results. In particular, Microsoft seems to want to solve the ambiguity of some words used for queries. Also, the blog post suggests that users are better off querying Copilot with full sentences rather than single key terms.

Another addition, Multi-Modal with Search Grounding, again seems to mainly reap the benefits of OpenAI innovations. Indeed, a key difference between the earlier GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 is the fact that the latest model can handle both text and images. Adding images into the Bing search engine will soon be possible, after which the Copilot function should be able to translate this input into desired results.

The Copilot capabilities within the Edge browser do not stop there. Medhi additionally notes that Inline Compose allows Edge users to rewrite text. This is similar to what Copilot can also do in Word and is now a very familiar feature of ChatGPT, Google Bard and countless other LLMs, with varying degrees of success. Regardless, Google is said to be busy working on a similar addition in Chrome. “Help Me Write” is already present in several Workspace apps, but would also be on its way to the Google browser, according to 9To5Google.

Test phase for “more complex tasks

Currently, the so-called Code Interpreter capability is still in a testing phase. With this, Copilot should be able to handle “more accurate calculations, programming, data analysis, visualization, math and more.” It sounds promising and reflects the Copilot ambitions Microsoft expressed at Ignite in mid-November.

Also read: New Microsoft Copilot offerings specialize for numerous professions