"It's a new day for search," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said today. For 13 years now, Microsoft has tried to get you to use Bing, but you didn't want to, so its global market share remains in the low single digits. Now, the company is pulling out all the stops in an effort to better compete with Google. Today, at a press event in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft announced its long-rumored integration of OpenAI's GPT-4 model into Bing, providing a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine. The company is also launching a new version of its Edge browser today, with these new AI features built into the sidebar.

A little over a year after its initial release, a digital note-taking app called Journal is making the leap from being an experimental project housed with Microsoft's internal incubator, Microsoft Garage, to becoming a full-fledged Microsoft Windows application. The company this week announced the new note-taking app will now be available as "Microsoft Journal," allowing users to capture their thoughts and create drawings using their digital pen on Windows tablets, 2-in-1s and other pen-capable devices. The original idea behind Journal was to offer users an alternative to grabbing a pen and paper when inspiration strikes, while still allowing them to express themselves through writing. The concept was familiar to the company, which had first launched an ink-focused application called Journal back on its Tablet PC in 2002 and continued to release "ink" capabilities across apps like Whiteboard, OneNote, PowerPoint and more, the company explained at the time. Journal, however, wanted to push the concept forward by combining the digital ink input with AI technologies.

Microsoft has added to the slowly growing pile of technologies aimed at spotting synthetic media (aka deepfakes) with the launch of a tool for analyzing videos and still photos to generate a manipulation score. The tool, called Video Authenticator, provides what Microsoft calls "a percentage chance, or confidence score" that the media has been artificially manipulated. "In the case of a video, it can provide this percentage in real-time on each frame as the video plays," it writes in a blog post announcing the tech. "It works by detecting the blending boundary of the deepfake and subtle fading or greyscale elements that might not be detectable by the human eye." If a piece of online content looks real but'smells' wrong chances are it's a high tech manipulation trying to pass as real -- perhaps with a malicious intent to misinform people.

Microsoft plans to spend $40 million to support collaborative projects leveraging artificial intelligence for medical research and discoveries. The five-year program, called AI for Health, is the fifth program Microsoft has rolled out as part of its AI for Good initiative, the tech giant announced Wednesday. Microsoft's AI for Good is a $165 million program to provide researchers and nonprofits with technology tools to address pressing concerns such as global climate, humanitarian and accessibility issues. "Artificial intelligence has the potential to solve some of humanity's greatest challenges, like improving the health of communities around the world," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, said in a statement. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement that AI "represents one of technology's most important priorities, and healthcare is perhaps AI's most urgent application."

Microsoft has announced a five-year, $40 million initiative aimed at leveraging artificial intelligence to empower people and organizations working to advance solutions to urgent global health challenges. Part of the AI for Good initiative, a $165 million effort launched by the company in 2017, AI for Health, as the new initiative is called, will focus on ensuring that nonprofits, academia, and research organizations have access to the technology, resources, and technical experts they need to apply AI and data science to their work. To that end, the initiative will focus on three areas: accelerating the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease; advancing a shared understanding of mortality and longevity to protect against global health crises; and addressing inequities among and improving access to care for underserved populations. Inaugural AI for Health grantees include Bangladesh-based BRAC, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Pensacola-based Intelligent Retinal Imaging Systems (IRIS), the Novartis Foundation, Seattle-based PATH, and Seattle Children's Research Institute. "Unlocking and sharing data is critical to discovering new ways to treat and ultimately cure cancer," said Raphael Gottardo, scientific director of the Translational Data Science Integrated Research Center at the Hutch.

Before its Build Developer Conference, Microsoft released several new Machine Learning services and Cognitive Services updates, ranging from no-code tools to hosted notebooks, with several new APIs and other services in-between. The Cognitive Services updates include an API for building personalization features, a form recognizer for automating data entry, a handwriting recognition API, and an enhanced speech recognition service that focuses on transcribing conversations. According to a TechCrunch article around updates for Cognitive Services, an essential service is Personalizer – a service providing a machine learning technique that doesn't need the kind of labeled training data typically used in machine learning. Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie, leading the company's Cloud and AI Group, said in a VentureBeat article: Use of Personalizer in Microsoft stores and online systems has led to performance improvements of more than 40% in some instances. Note that users can leverage Personalizer next to existing recommendation tools on the Azure platform.

Microsoft today announced three new services that all aim to simplify the process of machine learning. These range from a new interface for a tool that completely automates the process of creating models, to a new no-code visual interface for building, training and deploying models, all the way to hosted Jupyter-style notebooks for advanced users. Getting started with machine learning is hard. Even to run the most basic of experiments takes a good amount of expertise. All of these new tools greatly simplify this process by hiding away the code or giving those who want to write their own code a pre-configured platform for doing so.

Microsoft Corp. has launched a new series of online courses for executives to learn about AI, as it tries to help businesses catch up to the trend of AI in business. AI Business School is a free course to educate executives about the advantages of integrating AI into their business and how to prepare their staff for the advancements it provides. Microsoft already offers similar courses for developers (AI School) and engineers (Microsoft Professional Program for Artificial Intelligence), but AI Business School will be the first of its kind for executives; as it is geared much more towards the organizational and operational aspects of implementing AI than the previous courses, which were centred around the more technical aspects of AI. The course will focus on four main areas: culture, strategy, responsible AI, and technology. A Microsoft blog post carried an endorsement from Edmund Monk, chief executive of the leading membership body for learning professionals, the Learning and Performance Institute.

Microsoft today introduced the AI for Humanitarian Action initiative, a $40 million, five-year plan to support developers interested in creating tools and services with the goal of helping humanity. The initiative will focus on four specific areas: refugees and displaced people, the needs of children, disaster response, and human rights. This is Microsoft's third major AI for good initiative. The AI for Earth initiative first announced in 2017 is a five-year, $50 million pursuit to create artificial intelligence that helps the planet, supporting initiatives for things like biodiversity, conservation, and climate change. One initiative to receive a grant from Conservation Metrics is using AI to recognize the unique sounds of elephants' calls to track them over time.

Microsoft is launching a $25 million initiative to use artificial intelligence to build better technology for people with disabilities. CEO Satya Nadella announced the new "AI for Accessibility" effort as he kicked off Microsoft's annual conference for software developers. The Build conference in Seattle is meant to foster enthusiasm for the company's latest ventures in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, internet-connected devices and virtual reality. Microsoft competes with Amazon and Google to offer internet-connected services to businesses and organizations. The conference and the new initiative offer Microsoft an opportunity to emphasize its philosophy of building AI for social good.