Whether you're using a Microsoft Windows computer or an app like Word or PowerPoint, you can get free virtual help and training through Microsoft's website, Kurt "The CyberGuy" Knutsson reports. Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are taking over the landscape of our everyday lives, and now Microsoft has just announced its own tool called 365 Copilot. It's meant to help people with work-related tasks, so anyone using it can be more productive. The announcement comes just a couple of months after the company revealed it would invest some $10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. CLICK TO GET KURT'S CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, SECURITY ALERTS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER AI tool 365 Copilot combines large language models (LLMs) with data.

Information had leaked at the beginning of the year that MicrosoftMicrosoft intended to integrateartificial intelligenceartificial intelligence in Office software. It is now done, and just like with Bing, the firm has used GPT-4, the new version of the large language model (LLM) behind ChatGPTChatGPT. Called Copilot, this AI is intended to assist in productivity and therefore differs significantly from ChatGPT. Copilot will be accessible from all applications Microsoft 365Microsoft 365. This includes including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as Teams and Outlook.

Humans are hard-wired to dream, to create, to innovate. Each of us seeks to do work that gives us purpose -- to write a great novel, to make a discovery, to build strong communities, to care for the sick. The urge to connect to the core of our work lives in all of us. But today, we spend too much time consumed by the drudgery of work on tasks that zap our time, creativity and energy. To reconnect to the soul of our work, we don't just need a better way of doing the same things.

During an AI-focused press event today, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot, its latest push to embed its suite of productivity and enterprise apps with AI. Currently in testing with select (around 20) commercial customers, Copilot combines the power of AI models including OpenAI's recently announced GPT-4 with business data and Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. "Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. Copilot handles different tasks depending on the app in which it's used. For example, in Word, Copilot writes, edits, summarizes and generates text, while in PowerPoint and Excel, Copilot turns natural language commands into designed presentations and data visualizations.

Cortana may have stopped offering consumer services, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft's virtual assistant is pushing up the virtual daisies in some corner of the metaverse. Instead, she's got a new job, offering a natural language interface into Microsoft 365 services. One of those services is ideal for the new world of hybrid work, where we spend much of our time trying to schedule both physical and online meetings. With meetings needing to be coordinated across internal and external calendars, setting up the average meeting now takes anything up to 30 minutes. Each meeting you're trying to organize adds up to quite a bite out of the workday, a hefty distraction that takes you out of your workflow.

Project Cortex uses AI to organise content, delivering topic cards, topic pages and knowledge centres in Office, Outlook and Teams. Microsoft's history with knowledge management goes back a long way, from pre-SharePoint tooling with Site Server, through its abortive Knowledge Network platform, to today's mix of Bing and the Microsoft Graph for Microsoft 365 subscribers. Now the company is trying again, adding machine learning to the mix to help organisations understand what they know, and more importantly, who knows it. This time there's a lot more training data, a deeper understanding of the knowledge graph that underpins most businesses, and above all, the hyperscale compute of the modern cloud. Microsoft's Project Cortex is an ambitious set of tools built around Microsoft 365, intended to automate the complex process of building and deploying knowledge management systems.

For the past several years, Microsoft researchers have been focused on finding ways to make commercial use of machine-reading technology. It looks like some of that work is about to become commercialized in the form of bringing machine-reading comprehension into search results. Based on information in Microsoft's Ignite conference session list, Microsoft may be ready to show this off as soon as next week. Machine-reading comprehension involves the automatic understanding of text. It involves computer vision, natural-language understanding and other technologies.

Writing requires a dash of uniquely human creativity. Artificial intelligence alone cannot do it for us, at least not very well. But AI can – and already is – helping us do things like make sure we spell words correctly and use correct grammar, through the myriad ways it is infused across the suite of Microsoft 365 products. Some of them were even used to craft this story. As the AI in these products is becoming more sophisticated, they are helping us do more than spot a misspelled word.

AI, mixed reality, and Microsoft Graph have implications for the future of the company's team collaboration platform, Teams. I attended Microsoft Build last month, and bring tales from the future. For Build, an annual conference for software engineers and Web developers, is where Microsoft promotes its products and the tools, techniques, and directions for its third-party ecosystem that have the greatest likelihood of influencing the future. This is especially relevant in the case of Microsoft Teams, given that Teams, unlike Skype for Business, is first and foremost a collaboration solution platform. Three focus areas from Build have implications for the future of Teams: artificial intelligence (AI), mixed reality, and Microsoft Graph.

Prefer to watch – here is my event video … (if the video doesn't' show up – check here): Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn't show up, check here): Event Report - Microsoft Build - AI, Azure, IoT and Windows Push from Holger Mueller Want to read on? Here you go: Big push on IoT. IoT got a lot of keynote time across Nadella and Guthrie, Microsoft is pushing big on the IoT edge with its offering Intelligent Edge for IoT, where it can deploy a subset of its capabilities, in similar way like Azure Stack. It might be even that both capabilities share similar product features. For enterprises to be able to deploy the same code – e.g. for analytics, on Azure as well as IoT edge is an interesting product strategy and roadmap.