Microsoft will soon demo its ChatGPT-like AI in Word, Outlook and PowerPoint

Microsoft announced the integration of OpenAI's ChatGPT in the Bing search engine and Edge browser last week. The Redmond company has also been working on its own ChatGPT-like AI, and will demo it soon in its Office apps.

Microsoft's Prometheus Model: The next-gen AI to power Office apps

This isn't particularly breaking news. A report published by The Information in early January 2023, said that Microsoft is working on integrating OpenAI's chatbot in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other apps to help users write better, such as replies to mails, autocomplete documents, and more.

Image courtesy: The Verge

Microsoft's new chatbot isn't just a reskinned version of ChatGPT, it is based on Open AI's next-generation language model. It is called the Prometheus model. It was featured in Microsoft's recent announcement, it was touted as more powerful than ChatGPT and customized for search.

The company is focussing its efforts on Prometheus to use the Bing search index, and training techniques, to improve the relevancy of answers for queries made by users, providing answers with links and citations (annotation). It is also capable of providing up-to-date results including real-time news, understanding the geolocation of the user. The Prometheus model will also focus on increasing the safety of results provided by the AI, to ensure it doesn't deliver inappropriate results.

During the new Bing announcement, Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, revealed that Bing saw its biggest jump in search relevance in over 2 decades when they applied the AI language model to the Core Search Index of the search engine.

The new Bing's search can display search results alongside answers that are relevant to the query, on the same page, but in a sidebar. It can summarize the contents of a webpage or a document, and you can run queries about the contents. Here is an example from the recent event on how the new Bing works.

The AI language model in Microsoft Office apps will use a similar sidebar experience to allow users to interact with the chatbot for their work, such as writing letters, translating languages, etc. It has a compose tab to preview the generated contents of the mail or document in Outlook and Word respectively. While Bing can generate tables and charts, the new AI model will help generate graphs and graphics in PowerPoint.

 

Microsoft is planning to announce the AI in Office apps in March 2023, with a demo to highlight how it works. The company already has a preview version of Microsoft Viva Sales powered by GPT and Azure OpenAI. It integrates with Microsoft 365 to provide sellers an easy way to respond to mails from customers. You can watch a demo of it on YouTube.

Bing's AI chatbot is still a work-in-progress, and occasionally delivers inaccurate results. There is a waitlist to access the Chatbot in Bing, so the service doesn't have a lot of people using it at the moment. This could prove to be useful for Microsoft, which has a team of engineers working on it to monitor the feedback received from users, to improve the language model, before it is released en masse.

The Battle of the chatbots: Rise of the AI

According to The Verge's sources, Microsoft's original plan was to announce its Bing AI at the end of this month, but Google Bard's announcement had forced their hand to push Bing AI as soon as possible, and it was revealed the very next day.

Unfortunately for Google things didn't go per the plan, Bard started off awkwardly as the chatbot delivered some wrong results during a Live presentation, it was criticized by the Mountain View company's employees. Microsoft, on the other hand, is confident that its Bing AI is superior to its rival, integrating it into Office apps could give it a significant foothold, and establish itself as the leader in the AI wars.

Over 1 million people have signed up to access the chatbot in Bing, which also saw the iOS app jump to the top of the App Store among the most popular apps. Microsoft's integration of ChatGPT in its Edge browser could play a crucial role in capturing the market. However, it isn't the only one with that idea. Opera is already working on a way to integrate ChatGPT into its sidebar, and showcased it in a video. It's only a matter of time before Google does the same in Chrome, and that's when things will really begin to heat up.

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