Microsoft Enhances Copilot with New Design-Focused Features

As the excitement builds for Super Bowl weekend, Microsoft is making waves by joining the festivities for the first time in four years. Microsoft's AI-powered chatbots and assistants, collectively known as Copilot, are receiving significant upgrades alongside a high-profile Super Bowl LVIII ad campaign. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's chief marketing officer, outlined the latest enhancements in a blog post, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of Microsoft's entry into AI-powered experiences with Bing Chat.

The updated Copilot experience across web, Android, and iOS platforms introduces an enhanced AI model named Deucalion, along with a revamped user interface featuring a cleaner design for responses and a carousel of suggested prompts. These prompts aim to facilitate interactions with Copilot, such as providing guidance on explaining complex concepts to a broader audience.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Microsoft's foray into AI-powered experiences with Bing Chat. Over the past year, Copilot has witnessed exponential growth, facilitating over 5 billion chats and 5 billion images, leading to increased adoption of Edge and Bing. Building on this momentum, Microsoft is introducing enhanced image creation capabilities within Copilot.

Moreover, Designer in Copilot, leveraging generative AI models like OpenAI's DALL-E 3, now offers new editing capabilities. Users in English-speaking regions like the U.S., U.K., Australia, India, and New Zealand can edit images directly within the chat flow, enabling tasks like colorization, background blurring, or style changes. Subscribers to Copilot Pro, Microsoft's premium plan, gain additional features like resizing and regenerating images between portrait and landscape orientations.

Upcoming features include Designer GPT, promising a more immersive canvas within Copilot for visualizing ideas. However, previous incidents involving malicious use of Designer to create pornographic deepfakes of celebrities like Taylor Swift raised concerns. Microsoft claims to have addressed loopholes, but ongoing vigilance against misuse remains essential.

However, some users have reported performance issues with Copilot Pro, including prolonged generation times and potential bugs, raising questions about server capacity and service optimization.

As Microsoft continues to enhance Copilot's capabilities and address user concerns, the platform remains a key driver in Microsoft's broader AI strategy, aiming to make AI accessible and impactful for all users.