New Delhi, Dec 27 (IANS) Microsoft has quietly launched a new dedicated Copilot app in the Google Play Store, offering the users access to its AI-powered Copilot without the Bing mobile app.

The new AI-powered assistant is now available for Android users, reports Neowin, but an iOS version is not available yet.

The Copilot app on Android is similar to ChatGPT, with access to chatbot capabilities, image generation through DALL-E 3, and the ability to draft text for emails and documents.

It also includes free access to OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 model.

“In addition, you can use Copilot within the Microsoft Edge browser for Android, SwiftKey, Skype, and more,” said the report.

“Improve Your Productivity with Copilot–Your AI-Powered Chat Assistant. Copilot is a pioneering chat assistant from Microsoft powered by the latest OpenAI models, GPT-4 and DALL·E 3,” according to the app description.

“These advanced AI technologies provide fast, complex, and precise responses, as well as the ability to create breathtaking visuals from simple text descriptions. Chat and create all in one place for free,” said Microsoft.

Microsoft recently rebranded Bing Chat to Copilot. The tech giant has also partnered with Suno, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI)-based music creation, to bring their capabilities to its AI-powered chatbot Copilot.

Earlier this month, the company announced a number of new features which will be added to its Copilot service soon, including OpenAI’s latest models.

New Delhi, Oct 5 (IANS) Microsoft India on Thursday announced the addition of four new languages -- Bhojpuri, Bodo, Dogri, and Kashmiri, to Translator -- expanding support to a total of 20 languages now.

Microsoft Translator now supports -- Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Bodo, Dogri, and Kashmiri.

This brings Microsoft Translator a step closer to its goal of supporting all 22 official Indian languages and now covers the languages spoken by almost 95 per cent of the country’s population, the company said.

“We stay committed to supporting India’s diverse languages and culture by leveraging the most advanced AI technology to drive the country’s growth and make access to technology more inclusive," Rajiv Kumar, Managing Director, India Development Center, Microsoft India, said in a statement.

The translation feature can be accessed through the Microsoft Translator app, Edge browser, Office 365, Bing Translator, and the Azure AI Translator API for businesses and developers, which is being used by companies such as Jio Haptik and Koo. 

Microsoft's collaboration with Jio Haptik and the integration with Translator play a pivotal role in bridging linguistic divides and empowering India's diverse communities through technology access for all major Indian languages.

"This development is quite exciting for Haptik because it offers our customers the opportunity to be more inclusive and reach a wider audience. They can now provide support in languages like Bhojpuri, Bodo, Kashmiri, Dogri -- which is phenomenal," said Swapan Rajdev, Co-founder & CTO, Jio Haptik.

This new update will impact close to 61 million people and will open new economic opportunities for local artisans and businesses, allowing them to connect with a broader audience, the company stated.

New York, July 7 (IANS) Indian-American Gurdeep Pall, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, who helped build and promote Windows, Skype and Bing, intends to retire from the company in September, a media report said.

According to The Information, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed his departure via email, describing it as “a long-planned retirement”.

Chandigarh-born Pall joined Microsoft in January 1990 as a software design engineer, and has since worked on many breakthrough products in his tenure, starting with LAN Manager Remote Access Service.

In his 33-year-long tenure at Microsoft, Pall has worked with former CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and current CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella, frequently appearing alongside the executives to demo major product launches.

Pall contributed to the integration of TCP/IP, the fundamental software protocol of the internet, into Windows.

After 2005, he was mainly responsible for the product and R&D department, development and management of Skype, Teams, Microsoft voice, mobile search, and Bing Maps.

He also played a crucial part in Microsoft’s project called Airsim -- a drone simulation software product launched in July 2022.

However, Microsoft cut costs through layoffs on this project and its current development is not known, The Information reported.

Named one of the "15 Innovators & Influencers Who Will Make A Difference" in 2008 by Information Week, Pall co-authored "Institutional Memory Goes Digital", which was published by Harvard Business Review as part of Breakthrough Ideas for 2009, and subsequently presented at the World Economic Forum 2009 in Davos.

He studied in Chandigarh's St John's school before completing his engineering degree in computer science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani.

Pall also holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Oregon.

He is on the board of trustees of Ashesi University, Ghana.

New Delhi, June 24 (IANS) Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the US, discussed several key topics with him and one important subject was how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help improve the lives of Indians.

Prime Minister Modi met Nadella and other key leaders at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Friday, along with a delegation of officials from India.

"While these conversations were private, one important topic was the power of technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI), to help improve the lives of Indians," Microsoft said in a statement to IANS.

India is home to one of the most vibrant developer and start-up ecosystems in the world.

"Microsoft remains deeply committed to the growth of Indian technology -- that will impact both India and markets across the globe," the company added.

In January this year, Nadella during his India visit said that Modi's digital vision and all the programmes that have been launched around that vision are creating amazing digital public goods, which are the greatest contributions to the world.

India Stack is a set of open APIs and digital public goods that aim to unlock the economic primitives of identity, data, and payments at population scale.

"The magic of India Stack is unlike anything that I have seen anywhere in the world, which is perhaps the greatest contribution that India can make to the world," Nadella emphasised.

He later tweeted that "we're looking forward to helping India realise the Digital India vision and be a light for the world".

New Delhi-  Professional social networking platform LinkedIn now has 100 million members in India, up 19 per cent year-on-year, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has informed.

The Microsoft-owned LinkedIn saw record engagement in the March quarter as more than 930 million members globally now turn to the professional social network to connect, learn, sell and get hired.

"Member growth accelerated for the seventh consecutive quarter as we expanded to new audiences. We now have 100 million members in India, up 19 per cent," Nadella said during the company's Q3 2023 earnings call late on Tuesday.

As Gen Z enters the workforce, "We saw 73 per cent year-over-year increase in the number of student sign-ups," Nadella added.

LinkedIn Talent Solutions continues to help hirers connect to job seekers and professionals to build the skills they need to access opportunity.

"Our hiring business took share for the third consecutive quarter. The excitement around AI is creating new opportunities across every function from marketing, sales and finance to software development and security," said Nadella.

The LinkedIn revenue increased 8 per cent in the March quarter for the tech giant. In 2016, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for more than $26 billion.

The platform has introduced new AI-powered features, including writing suggestions for member profiles and job descriptions and collaborative articles.

"Our exclusive partnership with Netflix brings differentiated premium video content to our ad network, and our new Copilot for the web is reshaping daily search and web habits," Nadella informed.

(IANS)

San Francisco, March 31 (IANS) Microsoft-owned OpenAI, the company that created AI chatbot ChatGPT, is facing a new complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) being asked to investigate the company and suspend its commercial deployment of large language models, including ChatGPT.

The nonprofit research group Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP) made public its complaint against OpenAI on Thursday, alleging the company violated Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair and deceptive business practices, reports CNBC.

According to CAIDP, GPT-4 is "biased, deceptive, and a risk to privacy and public safety".

Moreover, the AI policy group said the large language model fails to meet the agency's standards for AI to be "transparent, explainable, fair, and empirically sound while fostering accountability", according to the report.

The group is asking the FTC to require OpenAI to establish an independent assessment of GPT products before they are deployed in the future.

Further, the report said that it also wants the FTC to establish a public incident reporting system for GPT-4, similar to the systems it already has in place for reporting consumer fraud.

The AI policy group also requests that the agency undertake a rulemaking initiative to develop standards for generative AI products.

Meanwhile, several top entrepreneurs and AI researchers, including Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, have written an open letter, asking all AI labs to immediately pause training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months.

Arguing that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, more than 1,100 global AI researchers and executives signed the open letter to pause "all giant AI experiments".

San Francisco, March 30 (IANS) Microsoft has announced that it is bringing ads to its AI-powered Bing chat, its new search agent powered by OpenAI's GPT-4.

Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft corporate vice president, in a blogpost said, the company is "exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response".

According to the company, there are now more than 100 million daily active users of Bing.

New scenarios like chat are driving engagement, including more than 100 million chats.

The company also mentioned that of the millions of users in Preview, one-third are new to Bing, creating a net new opportunity for publishers.

Seeing the encouragement the Bing chat is getting, the tech giant shared updates on their goals, approach, and early progress, which it will be bringing to the AI chatbot.

"First, we want to drive more traffic to publishers in this new world of search. It is a top goal for us, and we measure success in part by how much traffic we are sending from the new Bing/Edge. Second, we want to increase revenue to publishers. We seek to do this by both driving more traffic to them through new features like chat and answers and by also pioneering the future of advertising in these new mediums," the company said.

"Lastly, we want to go about this in a collaborative fashion working with the industry to continue to foster a healthy ecosystem," it added.

San Francisco, March 27 (IANS) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has hit back at Twitter CEO Elon Musk for criticising his for-profit company which is now owned by Microsoft.

During the 'On With Kara Swisher' podcast, Altman said OpenAI is "independent" from Microsoft.

Altman said Musk has been critical of OpenAI on Twitter.

"Elon Musk is obviously attacking us," he noted.

"To say a positive thing about Elon, I think he really does care about a good future with artificial general intelligence (AGI). I mean, he's a jerk, whatever else you want to say about him. But he has a style that is not a style that I'd want to have for myself," Altman was quoted as saying.

"But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future's going to look like for humanity," the OpenAI CEO added.

Musk tried to take control of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, in early 2018 but Altman and OpenAI's other founders rejected Musk's proposal.

Musk later walked away from the company and reneged on a massive planned donation, according to Semafor.

Musk told Altman that he believed the "venture had fallen fatally behind Google".

When Musk walked away, he resigned from its board in 2018 citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla.

According to the Semafor report, he also reneged on a promise to supply $1 billion in funding, contributing only $100 million before he walked.

In March, 2019, OpenAI announced it was creating a for-profit entity so that it could raise enough money to pay for the compute power.

Less than six months later, Microsoft infused $1 billion in OpenAI, and the rest is history.

New Delhi, March 23 (IANS) Microsoft-owned open-source developer platform GitHub has announced the launch of Copilot X, the company's vision for the future of AI-powered software development.

GitHub has adopted OpenAI's new GPT-4 model, and introduced chat and voice for Copilot, bringing Copilot to pull requests, the command line, and docs to answer questions on developers' projects.

"From reading docs to writing code to submitting pull requests and beyond, we're working to personalise GitHub Copilot for every team, project, and repository it's used in, creating a radically improved software development lifecycle," Thomas Dohmke, CEO at GitHub, said in a statement.

"At the same time, we will continue to innovate and update the heart of GitHub Copilot -- the AI pair programmer that started it all," he added.

The company is bringing a chat interface -- "Copilot chat" to the editor, which will be focused on developer scenarios and natively integrate with VS Code and Visual Studio.

Copilot chat will recognise what code a developer has typed, and what error messages are shown, and it's deeply embedded into the IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Copilot chat will also join GitHub's voice-to-code AI technology extension the company previously demoed, which it's now calling "Copilot voice", where developers can verbally give natural language prompts, according to the company.

Moreover, developers can now sign up for a technical preview of the first AI-generated descriptions for pull requests on GitHub.

This new feature comes powered by OpenAI's new GPT-4 model and adds support for AI-powered tags in pull request descriptions via a GitHub app that can be installed by organisation admins and individual repository owners.

GitHub is also launching Copilot for docs, an experimental tool that uses a chat interface to provide users with AI-generated responses to questions about documentation -- including questions developers have about the languages, frameworks, and technologies they are using, the company said.

San Francisco, Feb 24 (IANS) In order to test if people can use ChatGPT to instruct robots without knowing programming languages or understanding robotics systems, Microsoft has conducted research to see if it can think outside the text and think about the physical world to help with robotics tasks.

"The key challenge here is teaching ChatGPT how to solve problems considering the laws of physics, the context of the operating environment, and how the robot's physical actions can change the state of the world," Microsoft said in a blogpost.

"It turns out that ChatGPT can do a lot by itself, but it still needs some help. Our technical paper describes a series of design principles that can be used to guide language models towards solving robotics tasks. These include, and are not limited to, special prompting structures, high-level APIs, and human feedback via text," it added.

After ChatGPT was given access to object-detection and object-distance data via application interfaces, the Microsoft researchers investigated its ability to generate code, mostly in Python, for robotics scenarios such as zero-shot planning and code generation.

As the AI chatbot was trained on a large amount of code and written text, it can generate code.

The system can solve coding problems and debug programmes, as well as respond to dialogue and seek clarifications, according to the researchers.

Moreover, ChatGPT was tested as a language-based interface between a non-technical user and a drone using these dialogue and clarification capabilities in mind.

The researchers note that while GPT-3, LaMDA, and Codex demonstrated good results when it comes to robotics planning and coding, ChatGPT stands out as "a potentially more versatile robotics tool because it incorporates natural language and code generation models with dialogue flexibility".

"ChatGPT asked clarification questions when the user's instructions were ambiguous and wrote complex code structures for the drone such as a zig-zag pattern to visually inspect shelves," the researchers said.

Microsoft tested ChatGPT to use a robotic arm to move blocks around to form the Microsoft logo, with writing an algorithm for a drone to reach a point without crashing into obstacles, and whether ChatGPT can decide where a robot should go based on sensor feedback in real-time.

San Francisco: Microsoft is reportedly working on adding a new end task option to the Windows 11 taskbar, which will allow the ability to force close an app when users right-click on it in the taskbar.

According to Windows Latest, this new option has started appearing in the latest Windows 11 test builds.

Windows 11 currently allows users to kill any process using Task Manager, Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Settings as long as they can identify the name or Process Identifier (PID).

Moreover, the report mentioned that Task Manager also comes with a new search bar, making it much easier to identify background processes.

The new Windows 11 test build also comes with a big update for accessibility features.

This update enhances the Live Captions feature by adding support for several new languages, including Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, and others.

Further, the tech giant is also trying out different designs for snap layouts, including new ways to improve the discoverability and usage of snap layouts, according to the report.

Meanwhile, Microsoft will reportedly bring a new feature to Windows 11, which will allow users to control RGB lighting.

Twitter user Albacore found that the latest Insider build of Windows 11 includes a hidden feature for controlling RGB components.

(IANS)

New Delhi : Elon Musk on Friday criticised Microsoft for making profits via OpenAI, a non-profit organisation created by him. The AI chatbot ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI which is now a Microsoft company, has become a rage and the tech giant is infusing $10 billion into it to make it more useful for across industries.

Musk said that OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it "Open" AI), a non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google.

"But now it has become a closed-source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all," the Twitter CEO posted.

He responded to a follower who said: "Elon Musk says that AI is 'one of the biggest risks' to civilisation and needs to be regulated. He co-founded OpenAI."

ChatGPT is an advanced form of AI that is powered by the GPT-3 large language model. It is programmed to recognise human language and generate responses based on massive amounts of data. According to Musk, "ChatGPT has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become. AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn't have a user interface that was accessible to most people".

Musk stepped down from OpenAI's board of directors in 2018 and no longer owns a stake in the company.

"Initially, it was created as an open-source nonprofit. Now it is closed-source and for-profit. I don't have an open stake in OpenAI, nor am I on the board, nor do I control it in any way," he mentioned.

As part of his decision to create OpenAI, Musk stated that Google wasn't paying enough attention to AI safety.

(IANS)