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Microsoft needs to bring generative AI to the forefront of Windows and the PCs that run it.
At two meetings at its annual Build developer convention this week, the company unveiled a new line of Windows machines it calls Copilot PC, as well as generative AI-based features like Recall, with which users locate apps, files and other content they have. seen in the past. Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI brand, will soon be incorporated much deeper into the Windows 11 experience and new Microsoft Surface devices are on the way.
We’ve rounded up all the top announcements from Monday and Tuesday here.
Microsoft offers volumetric Windows apps (necessarily interactive and spatially tactile virtual reality apps) to the Meta Quest headset. Through a partnership with Meta, Microsoft says it will provide Windows 365 and local PC connectivity to the Quest headset, allowing developers to expand their apps into 3-d space.
During Tuesday’s keynote, Microsoft showed off a virtual 3D view of an Xbox controller from the position of a Meta Quest 3 headset, a virtual object that the user can manipulate with their hands. “We’re deepening our partnership with Meta to make Windows a world-class experience on Quest devices,” Pavan Davuluri, vice president of Windows and devices at Microsoft, said at the demo.
Developers can sign up to preview Microsoft’s new volumetric API.
Copilot PCs are Microsoft’s vision for flagship AI-powered Windows hardware. All of them come with dedicated chips called NPUs to force AI experiments like Recall. And they come with a minimum of 16GB of RAM, along with SSD storage.
The first Copilot PCs will feature Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips, which Microsoft says will offer up to 15 hours of internet browsing and 20 hours of video battery life. Chipmakers Intel and AMD are also committing to creating processors for Copilot devices in partnership with several manufacturers, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung.
Copilot PCs start at $999 and some can be pre-ordered today.
Microsoft’s recently introduced Surface devices, Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, in terms of functionality and battery.
The newest Surface Laptop, available with a 13. 8-inch or 15-inch display, has been redesigned with “modern lines” and slimmer screen bezels. It lasts up to 22 hours with a speed and is up to 86% faster than the Surface Laptop 5, according to the company. It also supports Wi-Fi 7 and has a haptic feedback touchpad.
As for the new Surface Pro, Microsoft claims it’s up to 90% faster than the previous-generation Surface Pro (Surface Pro 9) and features a new OLED with HDR display, Wi-Fi 7 (and optional 5G). ) and an ultra-wide front-facing camera. In addition, its removable keyboard, which has been reinforced with more carbon fiber, now has haptic feedback.
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Windows 11’s upcoming reminder feature can “remember” apps and content that a user accessed on their PC weeks or even months ago, for example, by helping them locate a Discord chat where they talked about clothes they were thinking about buying. Users can use Recall’s timeline to “Scroll Back” to see what they’ve been working on lately and browse files such as PowerPoint presentations for data that could possibly be applicable to their research.
Microsoft claims that Recall can create associations between colors, images, and more to allow users to search for virtually anything on their PCs in natural language (much like the Rewind startup generation); developers will be able to Recall by adding contextual data to their apps. And Microsoft says all user knowledge related to Recall stays personal and on-device, and it’s rarely used much to exercise AI models, which is important.
Here’s more from Microsoft: “Your snapshots are yours; remain on your PC. You can delete individual snapshots, adjust and delete time levels in Settings, or pause at any time directly from the icon in the formula tray of your taskbar. You can also delete apps and websites from the internet so that they are never saved.
There’s now more AI than ever in Windows and some in the new Copilot PCs.
A new feature called Super Resolution can repair old images by enlarging them. And Copilot can now analyze photographs to provide users with concepts for artistic compositions. Through a feature called Cocreator, users can generate photographs and also ask the AI-style to track what they draw. Edit or change the style of the image.
Elsewhere, live captions with live translations translate any audio coming from a PC, whether it’s from YouTube or a local registry, into the language of the user’s choice. Live translations will be in first place in around 40 languages, adding English, Spanish, Mandarin and Russian.
A separate but similar new feature of Microsoft Edge offers real-time video translation on sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Coursera, Reuters, CNBC, Bloomberg, and more. This feature, which supports translation, will be available in the near future. From Spanish to English and from English to German, Hindi, Italian, Russian and Spanish: translate spoken content through dubbing and live subtitles.
Team Copilot is the latest expansion to Microsoft’s Copilot suite of generative AI technologies in development. It integrates with Teams, the company’s video conferencing app, to help manage meeting agendas and take notes that can be co-authored in a meeting. And that extends to Loop and Planner, Microsoft’s scheduling and collaboration platforms, for creating and assigning tasks, tracking deadlines, and notifying team members when their input is needed.
In similar Copilot news, Microsoft has introduced (in a personal preview) Copilot extensions, which allow developers to extend GitHub’s code generation tool, GitHub Copilot, with third-party apps and skills. Launch partners come with DataStax, Docker, and LambdaTest; Extensions will live on the GitHub marketplace, but developers will also be able to create their own personal extensions to integrate with their internal systems and APIs.
Features like recovery and super solution run through the Windows Copilot Runtime, a collection of around 40 generative AI models that make up what Microsoft describes as “a new layer” of Windows. Along with the semantic index, a local vector formula on an individual Copilot PC, the Windows Copilot Runtime allows generative AI-based applications to run, adding third-party applications, without the need for a connection.
“[The runtime] is made up of out-of-the-box AI APIs, such as Studio Effects, live caption translation, OCR, callback with user activity, and [more], which will be available to developers in June. “Davuluri said Tuesday.
Microsoft says CapCut, the popular video editor from TikTok owner ByteDance, will use the Windows Copilot Runtime and the new accompanying Windows Copilot library, a set of AI progression APIs and tools, to enhance its AI capabilities. And Meta will upload the aforementioned Studio effects for WhatsApp will offer features like background blur and tactile video calls.
Azure AI Studio, Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service toolset that allows consumers to mix an AI style and create an application that “reasons with” that data, will soon allow developers to create paid inference API programs: the APIs through which developers can access and refine generative AI styles hosted on Azure infrastructure. Microsoft calls this “style-as-a-service” and is releasing it with Nixtla and Core42 styles to begin with.
In the adjacent Copilot Studio suite of products, Microsoft is releasing Copilot agents, which the company describes as AI robots that can “independently orchestrate responsibilities tailored to express roles and functions. “(Copilot Studio provides teams to connect Copilot for Microsoft 365, the “copilot” AI powered in applications like Excel and Word, to third-party data. )Leveraging memory and contextual knowledge, Copilot agents can navigate other types of business workflows, receive feedback from users, and ask questions when they encounter situations they’re in. I don’t know how to drive.
There’s a new kit from Qualcomm aimed at developers building apps for PCs with Copilot Arm chip.
The $899. 99 Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows, which incidentally measures about the same width, height, and longevity as Apple’s Mac Mini, houses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip combined with 32GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and plenty of I/O. The development kit supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5. 4, and through its USB-C and HDMI ports, you can control up to 3 4K monitors at once.
Microsoft has announced an addition to its Phi circle of generative AI style relatives, Phi-3-vision, capable of performing general visual research and reasoning tasks, such as answering questions about graphics and photographs. The style can read text and photographs and is effective enough to paint on a mobile device.
Phi-3-vision is available in preview, while the previously announced text-only opposite numbers (Phi-3-mini, Phi-3-small, and Phi-3-medium) are now available.
Microsoft is partnering with Khan Academy to provide access to cloud computing infrastructure, allowing Khan Academy to offer U. S. teachers access to cloud computing infrastructure. Free access to Khan Academy’s AI-powered tools in the U. S. The two corporations will also collaborate to explore opportunities for AI programs for math teaching. through generative AI, Microsoft announced Tuesday.
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This article appeared on TechCrunch in https://techcrunch. com/2024/05/21/microsoft-build-2024-windows-ai-operating-system-copilot-plus-pcs/