Microsoft's AI Advancements: Major Features Unveiled with Image Watermarking

0:00So, Microsoft at a recent New York event unveiled a whole bunch of significant AI advancements, including improved integrations with OpenAI's latest technology, which is a whole bunch of new and new new Surface devices, which has, you know, a built-in AI experience, which is really interesting. One of the major revelations was that the impending Windows 11 update is going to be filled with tons of different AI-centric functionality. So, Microsoft's AI Assistant, there's going to be Copilot, which is set to debut in September, in I think just a handful of days, September 26th or something like that.

0:47And this is one of the primary attractions a lot of people are interested in Microsoft plans to further expand co-pilot across Bing, Edge and Microsoft 365 this fall. Notably, I think by November 1st of this year, enterprise customers can get Microsoft 365 chat, which is a new AI workplace assistant and users can also anticipate some AI driven experiences in, of course, a bunch of different windows applications like Paint, Photos, and ClipChamp. It's kind of funny. ClipChamp is actually a cool tool if you haven't used it before. It's a video editing tool with a bunch of AI integrations that Microsoft has made.

1:26Microsoft Paint, I'm so curious to see how the new AI features play out in there. Of course, I don't know if you've used it, but if you haven't used Microsoft Paint in the last 10 years, it hasn't changed from 10 years ago. Pretty much the same. I'm sure the team at Microsoft is offended by that. I'm sure they've made some improvements, but it's not an incredibly complex piece of software to date in my humble opinion. But in any case, they're putting a bunch of new AI features in there. It should be cool to see what kind of comes out of that. However, what I will say is that Bing, Microsoft's kind of flagship search engine, was not left behind in all of these AI features.

2:02Earlier in March, Bing users experienced the integration of Dolly into the Bing chat, which is kind of cool, right? Can generate some images. Even ChatGPT wasn't doing that at the time but this kind of let them generate images um straight inside of the bing chat while initially this had a lot of like people had a lot of question marks around which version of dolly was actually being used microsoft has now confirmed an upgrade to uh the superior dolly 3 and so that is of course the latest version that was just announced by open ai yesterday or the day before i believe so i'm losing track of days in the week in case you don't in case you don't know i just live in a cave and report on the AI news to you.

2:44So you're welcome. In any case, this iteration has a bunch of advanced rendering capabilities, particularly for intricate details like fingers, eyes, shadows, right? All the stuff that companies like MidJourney really struggled with for a long time. Obviously, these are big challenges with AI generating images, but it looks like we're finally starting to fix those, find solutions. And so that is something that Dolly 3 has fixed. I think to kind of further its commitment to responsible AI usage, Microsoft is really kind of doubling down on generating safe images. So a notable new feature in this addition of invisible digital watermarks on AI generated images, which is called content credentials, is something they've just unveiled.

3:27And this is a cutting edge feature that essentially uses cryptographic techniques in compliance with standards from the Coalition for Content provenance and authenticity. That's the C2PA. And the initiative to enhance transparency in AI images has also been endorsed by Adobe, Intel, Sony, and a bunch of other kind of like big industry players. So this is really interesting, right? We're going to be able to essentially have these watermarks straight on the image that you can't see, you know, visible to the naked eye, but they're in there and these softwares will be able to tell what is AI generated.

4:01you know if there's deep fakes or other things made like that so taking personalization to the next level bing now fine-tunes answers to user search queries by reflecting on previous interactions with bing chat this is really interesting right it's something i've heard a lot of people say this about chat gbt but i don't think it's actually true but they're like yeah like chat gbt knows me so well by this point that like when i ask it to like act like me and based off everything i've said, like it just like perfectly like talks like me. I'm not really sure like what that effect is, but you know, Bing or like Chai Chibiti obviously can see its own chat, but I don't think it trains on every single message you've sent on your account and like stores the data for that.

4:41However, it would appear that Bing chat is starting to do that. So a spokesperson for Microsoft said, quote, if you've used Bing chat to learn more about your favorite movies, books, or music, future conversations and searches will take those interests into account when providing answers. I think this is kind of an interesting personal touch. It is, however, you know, optional and users can disable it if they desire. I'm sure a lot of people for privacy reasons don't want Bing tracking all of their conversations they've had with it. It's kind of like if Google, you know, saved all of your search history that you've ever had and used that to make relevant search results.

5:14Never really actually thought about it. They might actually already do that. So if you know the answer to that question, make sure to let me know in our AI Box Creators Facebook group. something else that I found really interesting is that in kind of the in like the concept of refining the search experience Microsoft highlighted the potential for Bing to inform users about events related to past search interests right this is kind of like I think like Spotify does this where if you listen to an artist a lot or follow them when they're going to go on tour like it'll give you a notification about them going on tour you'll be able to see that on their page and stuff and so I think they're kind of like trying to get extra insights like that integrated.

5:49I think the overarching aim is to make search results more relevant, drawing on the context of a user's search history and current web activity. So there you go. It looks like this is what Bing is rolling out now. And still, I don't know 100 % if Google does this, but if Bing is kind of rolling this out, it's likely that Google has or will do this in the future. In any case, for enterprise users, Microsoft is set to extend support for multi-model visual search and image creator to Bing Chat Enterprise, which is essentially benefiting over, I think, 160 million users that are currently integrated with the AI workplace chatbot.

6:28So it's not just about Bing and Windows when it comes to all of these different upgrades. Like I mentioned, Microsoft's SwiftKey, which is a popular third-party keyboard app for iOS and Android, is also getting AI-boosted features. So beyond the intuitive kind of, you know, typing experience, SwiftKey will soon have AI camera lenses, AI stickers and AI driven editors and AI image generation capabilities. So users can look forward to over, I think, 250 tools and filters. Many of them are coming from a collaboration with Snapchat in kind of like getting these out, which is really interesting. I did not see a Microsoft Snapchat collaboration on this, but very cool.

7:08and I think kind of rounding up all of the enhancements is the AI powered editor feature that promises instant grammar punctuation and spelling feedback now of course this is something we've all been experiencing for a long time so it'll be I'll be curious to see how much better this is than normal spell check and other things that we see but yeah definitely an interesting feature so I think Microsoft's kind of continuous effort to throw a ton of AI features is not new of course we're seeing this from a lot of other companies google is doing the same thing constant ai features and integrations into all of their products and services and i think at this point users like really like this they see a lot of value in it um you know these software companies it's like one of the things they're able to raise their prices for unlike anything else um and so i think we're going to see a lot more of kind of ai being integrated into everything whether that's microsoft google apple or whatnot well we'll see about apple but in any case um a lot of people are a lot of big companies are integrating this into everything.

8:05And I think this is a trend we'll continue to see.