On his 50th birthday, Microsoft is teaching the AI-powered Copilot Chatbot some new tricks.
Copilot can take action on “most websites,” Microsoft says, allowing you to book tickets and book restaurants. The bot has acquired the ability to remember certain things about you, just like your favorite foods and movies, as well as Openai's ChatGpt. You can also analyze real-time video from your mobile phone and answer questions in the context of “watching.”
The upgrade is reportedly Microsoft is pondering the Copilot update. Copilot is often behind rivals ChatGpt and Google's Gemini.
As of Friday, Copilot can complete tasks on the web along the line of how “agent” tools like Openai operators do it. Microsoft says it has partnered with compatibility between 1-800-Flowers.com, Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, Opentable, Priceline, Tripadvisor, Skyscanner, Viator, and VRBO with Day One. When you enter the prompt “Send a bouquet to your partner,” Copilot will try to check that particular To item from the list.
Copilot can now retrieve pages from the search engine Perplexity books and track online transactions. Tell your bot to look for price drops and sales for items. This will let you know when they happened and provide you with a link to your purchase.
It's not clear how well Copilot does various chores. Microsoft gave little details about how the feature works. And unlike some of its competitors, Copilot did not publish any data that could be difficult or needed by humans to intervene.
Perhaps the website may block Copilot as well, so that Openai operators can block them. For example, if you are worried that fewer people will visit the app in person, companies may do so.
Image credits: Microsoft
Fortunately, other new features in Copilot are not ambiguous and potentially controversial.
The improved co-pilot can generate “podcasts” that resemble the audio overview of Google's Notebook Lum. Considering websites, research, or other sources, Copilot creates a fore-and-forth conversation between two synthetic hosts. Just like with the audio overview, you can interrupt the host at any time to ask questions, acknowledge it and respond.
On Android and iOS, Copilot can see what's within the range of vision of your phone's camera or photo gallery and answer questions about it (“What is this strange flower?”). Also, on Windows, the Revamped Copilot app allows you to view what's on your desktop screen, and check for changes to settings, organizing files, and more. Starting next week, members of the Windows Insiders program will be first deployed.
This reporter hopes that Copilot has reasonable protections in place to prevent it from reading private files and making desktop destructive mistakes. However, providing information before press time was difficult.
Elsewhere, Copilot has new projects and integrated page features that draw great inspiration from ChatGpt Canvas and Anthropic's Claude Artifacts tools. The page places notes and research on canvases that help the co-pilot organize and turn it into documents.
Copilot's new deep research capabilities complement Pages and find, analyze and combine information from online sources, documents and images to answer more complex queries, just like ChatGpt Deep Research and Gemini's Deep Research.
Finally, as mentioned before, Copilot remembers more about you. Microsoft says the bot will pay attention to your preferences when you interact with it and provide “tailored solutions”, “active suggestions”, and reminders.
If the chatbot's outlook that remembers intimate details about your past conversations is bothering you, there are ways to delete individual “rememories” or opt out completely, Microsoft says.
“Adjunct officer [gives] Microsoft controls through the user dashboard and the option to select the type of information you remember about you or opt out completely.