Microsoft is beginning to roll out its next feature update of Windows 11, the Windows 11 2024 Update, beginning today. But Microsoft obviously isn't done yet, and it's offering a sneak peek at new Copilot experiences which will debut this fall, including Copilot Voice, Copilot Vision, and Copilot Daily, among others. On the surface, the new additions to Copilot sound similar to multimodal ChatGPT (or GPT-4o) that OpenAI launched earlier this year, where ChatGPT can now "see" and an Advanced Voice feature means that you can have conversations with it. But there are some key differences between what Microsoft and OpenAI are offering, and only some of Microsoft's Copilot innovations will be available right away. It's probably safe to say, though, that Copilot Voice will be the most important addition -- and Copilot Vision may not be.

Last June, Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI launched Copilot, a service that provides suggestions for whole lines of code inside development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio. Available as a downloadable extension, Copilot is powered by an AI model called Codex that's trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and functions given the context of existing code. Copilot can also surface an approach or solution in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish (e.g. "Say hello world"), drawing on its knowledge base and current context. While Copilot was previously available in technical preview, it'll become generally available starting sometime this summer, Microsoft announced at Build 2022.

Even though I didn't work at GitHub when they announced Copilot, I remember it piqued my interest. Perhaps, I was mostly excited because it was new and shiny. For me, the value of Copilot is that I spend less time stressing over syntax, which leaves more time for solving problems. More recently, GitHub Next, a team exploring the future of technology and software beyond the adjacent-possible, released Copilot Labs. This experimental VS Code sidebar enables developers to translate their code from one programming language to another and explains code snippets in plain language. These sound super cool, but when would you use them?