Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Microsoft, like most other major tech companies, is cramming as much artificial intelligence as it can into its products. It's shown up in Microsoft Edge, in the Office suite, and even in the most basic programs on the operating system, such as Notepad and Paint. It's difficult to get away from, but you're not obliged to use it. If you'd rather you didn't have AI assistants regularly interrupting you, or you want to rely on your own abilities to put one word in front of another, there are ways of disabling and hiding the AI.

It can be difficult to keep up with all the new artificial intelligence tools. You may even have access to numerous AI features and resources that you haven't had the time to notice. For example, Copilot Vision is now free for everyone to use in Microsoft Edge. That's perhaps not something you've realized if you don't use Edge as your regular browser, or if you've never heard of Copilot Vision. It's an extension of Microsoft's Copilot AI that can essentially'see' what you're looking at on the web.

Mobile translation apps have improved substantially in recent years--with a little help on speech recognition from AI. Most apps can now keep up with real-time conversations, if your phone has a strong enough internet connection (so the audio can be processed and converted in the cloud). It means if you're trying to hold a conversation with someone in a language you don't know, you no longer need to spend time typing out words and phrases, or trying to figure out spellings and pronunciations. Instead, simply place your phone between you and the other person, and start chatting. There are several apps that can do this for you, but here we'll focus on the free translation apps on your Pixel phone, Galaxy phone, or iPhone.

There are all kinds of reasons why you might want to extract text out of images. Maybe you've taken photos of restaurant bills and you want to make a record of what you've eaten; or perhaps you've got a bunch of screenshots that you need to get product names out of; or you could have scanned in some important documents that need sorting. Whatever the reason, Windows comes with built-in tools for picking out text from image files (technically known as OCR, or Optical Character Recognition)--in fact, there are several different ways, so you can pick the one that suits you best. Here's how to get started, assuming you already have your images saved somewhere. The Snipping Tool is the easiest way to extract text from images on Windows.

Neowin reports that tech giant Microsoft will be shaking up the user interface of its Microsoft 365 app early next year. In addition, the app will be getting a new icon and a small name change, henceforth to be called "Microsoft 365 Copilot" starting mid-January 2025. The app will no longer have a top header. Instead, tools like user profile, settings, and feedback will move to the bottom left toolbar. The feedback button will be available under the "Settings and more" section in the bottom left toolbar.

Like other browser makers, Mozilla is looking to bring more AI features into Firefox. The organization's latest effort is an experimental one for the Nightly build of the browser. Starting this week, you'll be able to add ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat or Le Chat Mistral to the sidebar. Highlight some text on the web and you can right click to ask your preferred chatbot to summarize the information, simplify the language or test your memory and knowledge of the excerpt. Mozilla says any chatbot use is entirely optional and none of them are integrated into Firefox's core functions.

Jupyter Notebook is an easy-to-use, open-source tool for web-based interactive computing. The Jupyter Notebook supports more than 40 different programming languages like R, Python, Java, etc. Therefore, most data science professionals tend to use Jupyter Notebooks to create and share documents, including code, equations, visualizations, computational outputs, markdown text, etc. The basic Jupyter Notebook environment is more befitting for general training and educational machine learning/deep learning model development requirements. However, the vanilla environment lacks certain features which makes it tedious to handle complex codes.

In addition to pushing out a boatload of new Surface hardware yesterday, Microsoft also made the October 2018 update of Windows 10 generally available--it should be heading to your machine soon if it isn't there already. Here are all the new features you're going to be able to take advantage of with the new update. This being Windows, of course, there are dozens of little tweaks and improvements spread across the vast amount of code that makes up the operating system, but these are some of the most significant differences you'll notice. The biggest upgrade arriving with Windows 10 is the Your Phone app, which you can find from the Start menu. If you remember the old Phone Companion app, it does something similar--essentially making it easier to use Windows 10 and your smartphone together.

Microsoft Word has been given a makeover, with a focus on simplicity. The new look ditches most of the icons in the banner at the top of the app, reducing three-lines of shortcuts down to a single row of the most commonly used features. Microsoft has redesigned each of the remaining icons with a new sharper, high-contrast style that it says will improve visibility for users. The simplified design is now available to Office 365 subscribers worldwide. Microsoft has also unveiled a similar update for Outlook featuring an AI search feature.