This week, Microsoft hosted their annual developer conference, Build 2023, and showcased fifty new product launches across their sprawling range of software and hardware products. Many of these were mundane, but amongst the incremental upgrades were two huge announcements that could radically change the burgeoning AI landscape. What’s more, these two developments came from areas that, a year ago, were considered among the most embarrassing missteps in Microsoft’s history; Bing, and Clippy.

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BING BLING

The first huge piece of news at Build was the revelation that Bing Search will soon feature in ChatGPT. If you’ve used Bing Search directly, you’ll be familiar with the way the AI peppers its output with citation links, much like a Wikipedia article. Shortly, ChatGPT will do the same, linking to Bing search results to support its claims. This is useful in and of itself, but it also represents a huge change to the way ChatGPT functions. Previously it was hamstrung by only having access to its training data, which was suspended in September of 2021; now it can search the web for factual information to corroborate its claims, making the service both substantially more useful, and considerably more reliable.  

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It’s huge news for Microsoft, even bigger news for OpenAI, but it’s arguably most exciting for us, the users. Google promised us web-enabled AI at Bard’s launch, but currently it feels rushed, with Bard happily referencing current events but haughtily protesting that it is not a search engine, and refusing to share links. Meanwhile, Bing Search offers a tantalizing glimpse of web-enabled AI, but a frustratingly cautious, corporate version, hamstrung by Microsoft’s fear of damaging its brand through toxic interactions with users. Both services can be confusing and arbitrary, with their limitations poorly understood and difficult to work around, and most users prefer ChatGPT even without web access. 

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They’ll prefer it more In future, as ChatGPT will use Bing as its default search engine, using a Microsoft-developed system called Prometheus which handles both chatbot and search engine, generating multiple search queries in Bing to not only verify the content being produced by ChatGPT, but also inform its generation. The best, it seems, is about to get a lot better. Meanwhile, Microsoft is also making big AI advances in a more familiar territory…

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THE RETURN OF CLIPPY

For the benefit of younger readers, Clippy was an animated paperclip who Microsoft insisted was a “personal assistant”, designed to help Windows users achieve basic tasks by offering advice and highlighting useful features. It made its first appearance in Windows 97, and quickly became wildly unpopular with users thanks to its habit of appearing randomly in the middle of the screen, incorrectly declaring “it looks like you’re writing a letter. Would you like some help?” By 2003 Microsoft were making adverts riffing on how much people hated Clippy, and by 2007 it was rusting on the scrapheap, living on only as a punchline in nerd jokes. So it seems brave for Microsoft to be reviving the concept in 2023, with Windows Copilot! 

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Microsoft have released or announced several “Copilots” in recent weeks, from the Office 365 Copilot to the programming assistant Github Copilot, alongside several smaller assistants bolted on to specific products. Windows Copilot seeks to knit all these services together, making interactions between programs easier, and also providing a framework to assist users with basic tasks, much as Clippy attempted to. The demo shown at the Build conference featured the standard folksy use-cases (“help me plan my fishing trip”), but the real power of Windows Copilot lies in more mundane tasks. Like Clippy, it offers practical advice about (and one-click execution of) your Windows machine’s features, but unlike Clippy it’s far more likely to be helpful than annoying, thanks to the AI’s smarts, but also the greatly enhanced feature set of the Windows product. The most impressive thing about Windows 97 was that while it crashed frequently, it didn’t crash as much as Windows 95; poor Clippy really didn’t have much to work with. 

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As well as being a cool product, it’s a fascinating watershed moment in computing. While the last six months have seen a wave of new products announced in the wake of ChatGPT’s rise to stardom, we’ve not seen any attempts from the major players to integrate chatbots into their operating systems, either on desktop or mobile. Google did not mention Android at all at their recent keynote, preferring to focus on their online software and search, and Apple has been even quieter on the subject. This is surprising, given the potential LLMs have to help casual users get more out of complex and powerful software. Windows Copilot is breaking new ground here, and from what we’ve seen so far Microsoft is learning from past mistakes. It will be interesting to see how Apple and Google respond.

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