Reviewing AI Innovations in Microsoft Edge

0:00Microsoft Edge is now an AI browser and they've rolled out a whole bunch of really interesting new features I wanted to cover on the podcast today. I've already made an episode talking a little bit about what they've announced when they made their big announcement, but I wanted to break down an actual, some of the actual examples of use cases I've been using it for that I've been pretty impressed with. I'll talk about some things that I think it's doing really well and some areas I think that they'll be improving on. But overall, if I'm being 100 % honest, this feels like maybe one of the first times I'm actually tempted to switch my browser that I use the most frequently, which for my last five years has been Brave.

0:32It's this privacy browser and it kind of blocks ads. So I've enjoyed that, but it doesn't have any of these new AI features. And as these is these basically tools are getting better and better. I'm, you know, basically feeling like I would love some of the new features added into Edge. So this is really cool. And I want to break down some of the some of the great things they're doing here. The other thing I wanted to mention is this isn't the first quote unquote AI browser. We know that Perplexity with Comet has come out with a tool just recently. But the problem with that is it's$200 a month.

1:01And I'm not really sold on spending$200 a month to use an quote unquote AI browser, something that I've been basically using for free my whole life. So Edge seems like a really awesome option. It is, you know, free and it's built into all of the all of the browsers that they have. All right. So I want to get into the first example of what I've been trying it out for. I'm looking at barbecues. And so I went over on Amazon and saw a bunch of barbecues that looked interesting. and instead of having to go and click on each of them individually, I actually went and opened up a tab for all of them, all of the different barbecues I was interested in.

1:37And instead of having to go and read all of the specs and dimensions and pricing of every single product and try to compare them, I don't know, make like a spreadsheet and maybe make some cells might be like a way I've done this sort of research in the past. I actually tried just going straight to Edge. So basically on the right-hand side of Edge, there's a little icon, a co-pilot icon you click and it opens up um you also will be able to see if you have a brand new tab of edge um opened up you'll see in the top right hand corner on like a new tab it says co-pilot discover preview and it's toggled on you can also toggle it off if you'd like um but regardless when i first saw that by the way toggled on i was like oh man i hate things that are automatically opted in but i actually think that microsoft has done this in a good way and basically to protect your privacy still so i'll show you exactly what what happened so basically I went opened up all of my tabs for different barbecues that I was interested in.

2:26I opened the side tab up and I said, look at all my tabs and give me the cheapest barbecue I'm looking at. It then said, I can't see your tabs because I haven't, because you haven't granted permission for me to view your browsing context. If you'd like to help me with that, you can enable this by going to our privacy settings and turning on the context clues toggle. Okay. So basically there's a link to the privacy settings. And if you open it up, there's a little toggle that's off by default. And so you toggle that back on and then you're able to get access to this feature. Honestly, I think this is the best way they could have done this, right?

2:58Because basically, sure, like the Edge thing is enabled by default, but your privacy settings by default doesn't actually let it see what's on your page, which I think is fantastic. I don't think everyone wants this automatically looking at what is on their web pages. But if you want to use this, it's so useful. You're going to want the ability to toggle it on. So in any case, that I thought was really slick and I appreciate that. I basically toggled it on and said, now try. And then it said, based on all of your open tabs, the cheapest barbecue grill you're currently looking at is the DNKM or charcoal grill outdoor barbecue.

3:31Okay. Basically it's this like$60 barbecue, to be honest, it's probably a little too cheap for me, but that's what I asked for. But the thing that I thought was really interesting here is when it gave the barbecue a title, if you click through all of the Amazon listings, I just like the way it's obviously much smarter than just like, I don't know, some sort of copy and paste tool. Basically, if you go look at all the Amazon, like all the Amazon barbecues, they really try to a lot of Amazon products or any products, they really try to like keyword stuff the title, right? So in this one in particular, nowhere does it say that it's the DNKMOR barbecue in the title.

4:08It's just like charcoal grill, outdoor barbecue grill, barrel charcoal grill with side tables, nearly 500 square inches cooking grill area, right? This is literally all in the title. There's keyword stuffing. So it actually was smart enough to know, to look at the barbecue and then to go and see who the seller was and decide that the seller was the brand name and put that in my title. So I actually appreciated that because if it had just said, you know, the cheapest barbecue is, and then just like all the keywords that they'd stuffed in the title. And I'm trying to like click around and figure out what the heck one it's talking about.

4:37Cause maybe a bunch of them use the same keywords in the titles. It would have been kind of confusing. This was a very easy way to do it. So I was impressed by that. Okay, the next question I asked is, which one looks like the highest quality? And of course, it told me that the Blaze Prelude was the highest quality. And when looking at the Blaze Prelude, it's also, I mean, I don't know if it kind of makes sense. It's the most expensive one. It's$1 ,700 versus that$70 one we were just looking at. And it lists out all of the reasons why it's the highest quality. I wanted to try something funny and see if I could kind of trick it up a little bit.

5:09one of the barbecues in particular, when it had like their their big, I guess, front picture, it was like it was a picture of the lobster in the barbecue. So I wanted to ask it, you know, which one is the best at cooking lobster? Now, just because there's a picture of lobster in the barbecue doesn't mean it's the best one at cooking lobster. In fact, I would probably argue that the more expensive barbecue is the best at cooking lobster has a bunch of features. But I was testing it out. So I thought that was kind of funny. I said, I mostly cook lobster, which one should I get? And it was not fooled by my by my attempt.

5:41It actually told me still the best one for cooking lobster was going to be the Blaze Prelude because of its heat zone separators, its flame stabilizing grids, its 304 stainless steel build, its built in thermometer. So a bunch of things that the other one did not have, even though it had a picture of a lobster. Actually, that was kind of cool. I wasn't able to trick it. And it also did give me a runner up barbecue if I wasn't looking for the most expensive one. So it actually suggested a second place one, which I that was interesting. And then I went and asked which one had the best photos. And it gave me it told me, you know, the Sophia and William six burner, I was just trying to test basically, it's like vision and what I was able to actually look at versus just copying text or looking at the text on the screen.

6:19So it told me which one had the best photos, I looked at it, I sort of agree. I mean, it's kind of hard on Amazon, they're all picture of barbecue with a white background. So it's kind of hard to determine. But it did have a it made some good points there. Okay. Okay, the next thing I wanted to actually go ahead and test with this beyond just like comparing everything across a bunch of tabs was, well, what happens if you're asking questions about one specific product? So I went over to the Tesla website. I just went to Tesla.com and I said, what is the cheapest car on here? Right. I didn't tell it.

6:50I didn't want to say on the Tesla website because I was like, well, maybe it just knows, you know, that the Model 3 is the cheapest. So I just was kind of vague on that. it said based on all of your tabs the cheapest cars you're currently viewing is the tesla model three so this is something interesting i noticed is if you tell it go look at all my tabs and give me this data it's going to look at all your tabs um what i probably could have said because all my prompt was is what's the cheapest car on here and then it looks on my tabs realizes only one of those about cars and gives this back to me i'm sure it could have said on the current tab i'm on what's the cheapest one and it probably would have just looked at that i mean to be honest it still did this in like one second.

7:25So I don't even think it would have sped it up at all. But I just I do think that that's interesting. If you don't want it to go for any reason, look at all the tabs, just look at the one you're on, you probably modify your prompt and say that. So anyways, it basically told me the Tesla Model 3 starting price is$3 ,800 on the website. So it it knew exactly what I was looking at, which I thought was kind of interesting. It then made some notes about some other cars and what they're at. Okay, what I then wanted to ask it, I was like, you what's its ability to actually compare products? So I said, make a table comparing the specs of each Tesla.

7:59And again, in like two seconds, it spit out a table comparing all the specs. Now, one thing that is really cool that I realized you can do is you can actually slide and drag the sidebar to be bigger, this kind of co-pilot sidebar. You can drag it out to take over more of your screen or less of your screen. So originally when I made the table, it was like quite small. I mean, it's trying to make a table and a very small sidebar, but dragged it out and was able to see everything in there. And it basically was showing me all of the features, the range, the miles an hour, the drive, the seating of all of the different cars.

8:29So to me, this was pretty useful. And then of course, it's, you know, asking some follow up questions and recommends, you know, do you want me to explain which Tesla model suits different lifestyles or what are the differences between the trim levels and, you know, show me the Tesla leasing and financing options. In another chat I did earlier with this, which I didn't capture on here, I also asked it, you know, based off of the price and based off of the range, which which which car on this website has the cheapest price per like for the range. And that was kind of interesting because it had to do a little bit of math and actually accurately solved that.

9:04It basically made a table like this, showed what the range was, what the price was divided and was able to show me like the, you know, dollars per mile. I think it was like eighty three dollars per mile of a Model 3 versus another model. So in any case, this was really, really interesting to me. I honestly think that this has become an insane tool. If you don't want like, like even in just the case of looking at these cars, there's like five different cars on here, you can scroll around, compare and look at them all. Or you could just ask and in like three seconds, it gives you this. One of my criticisms early on with this tool was that Microsoft had an example for like if you wanted like a cookie recipe.

9:43And basically at the top of every cookie recipe, it tells like the life story of the person that cooked that particular cookie. And you got to scroll quite a ways down to find the actual recipe. and the thing that I thought was really interesting is I kind of criticized the fact that it takes a long time to, I don't know, for it to generate the recipe. So I'm doing a test right now. As I just said that, I asked, I said, give me the recipe. I was on a cookie recipe page. I'm scrolling down to where I think the recipe should be and sure enough, it took me longer to scroll down to the bottom of the page and actually find where the recipe was than for it to just type it out on the side.

10:23It's really quick. I've been surprised by how fast it's actually able to generate results. So they have a pretty great model working in here. Overall, I'm really impressed with the model. I will say there's a couple of features I would love. The first one is you can actually talk to Copilot, which I think is amazing. So you click a little button and it's something in the middle of your screen that says basically like, you know, I'm able to, you know, Copilot Vision is active on this page and you can talk to it. Now, for some reason on my desktop, I wasn't able to get my microphone to work and I definitely could be like a me problem.

11:01But if you click on the settings, like typically on some sort of website like this, I click on the settings, I'd be able to see like my microphone settings, like which microphone is active because I have a lot in the studio that are kind of connected to this computer. And when you click on the settings, I'm only seeing settings for like voices. So it's probably buried somewhere in the settings of Microsoft Edge. I looked around and couldn't find it. So something I think myself and a lot of other people would love is when you have that little bar on the bottom, maybe just a way to see like what microphone is active, kind of like on Zoom or any of these other platforms that have that similar feature.

11:30And then you could actually talk to it, which I think is fantastic. One other small thing that I think to note is actually I really wanted to try this feature out. So I went over on my phone, downloaded Edge and did the same thing. And the first problem it had on Edge was the same thing that I mentioned before where on the sidebar, it like tells you to go enable your privacy settings. But on the app, it has a little link to the privacy settings. And if you click that link, nothing actually is happening. So they don't have like the deep link set up on the app the same way that it's set up on desktop.

12:04So these are small things, right? The developer goes and tweaks these things in a couple seconds, but I think this is getting better and better. To be honest, finding little, I don't know if you call them bugs, but little like things like that, honestly, you're kind of exciting to me that a company the size of Microsoft is going so fast and creating something so interesting and innovative that they're just releasing, even if there's small things that are not 100 % perfect, they're getting feedback. I saw Mustafa over on LinkedIn responding to some people making posts, saying things that they like and disliked about it.

12:35And he's like, appreciate the feedback. We'll work on a couple of those things. Really excited. It feels like it's a very alive product that they're putting out as fast as they can. It's very innovative. It's kind of like this beta. It's in this test mode. They're like trying and adding new features and changing things really quickly. This is the way I think technology should be. And so anyways, I'm very excited by what they've basically been able to build here. This is the first time I've seen a browser that felt like it had a real interesting value proposition that to me, I was like, gee, I probably should use this because I'm actually going to get more work done and it's going to be very useful for me.

13:10So really appreciate what they built. Thank Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you want to try all of the different AI models I talk about on the show, I'd love for you to go check out AIbox.ai. We are basically a platform that allows you to try all of the top AI models in one place for one price. And a cool feature that we are currently building out, if you've seen Google's launch of their Opal tool last week, which is a no-code AI app builder, that is actually the product that we've been developing at AIbox for the last two and a half years, except we'll have a platform where instead of just Google tools, you'll be able to access all tools.

13:45So tools from OpenAI, tools from Microsoft will all be hosted on there and you'll be able to use this no-code AI app builder with all of the different AI companies. So if you want to go check it out, the link's in the description. It is AIbox.ai. We're getting ready to release some really exciting updates quite soon. So stay tuned on that. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will catch you in the next episode.