CIOInsider India Magazine
Microsoft Build 2023: AI on the Spotlight!
It's clear from the agenda that AI will be the focus of Microsoft Build 2023, which runs from May 23 to 25 both online and offline. The yearly conference has featured the most recent Windows, Azure, and other developer and engineer platform releases from Microsoft. As a result, the tech giant has significantly outpaced its competitors in the continuing AI arms race.
Microsoft Build was primarily a convention where developers could see new tools and methods in action. The tech giant unveiled a number of AI-supported features and improvements to its line of products at the event.
Designing Web Pages Now Easy with Copilot
Microsoft wants to make developing websites easier. Its solution is AI. With the release of Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Power Pages, Microsoft's low-code business website development tool, in preview for US users. Copilot can create and change images and site design themes in addition to text, forms, chatbots, and web page layouts when given instructions.
Users can, for instance, describe the type of form they need to construct, and Copilot will build it and automatically create the required back-end database tables. Then, within Copilot, the tables can be modified, expanded upon, or eliminated using natural language. Additionally, the company disclosed that Microsoft Edge and Windows Copilot will both incorporate Bing Chat. The integration will provide consumers with incredibly personalized responses and pertinent suggestions.
The integration between each of these technologies is strong, and Microsoft will undoubtedly also incorporate its AI Copilot into Fabric
The integration of Bing Search into ChatGPT, a shared plugin platform with OpenAI and additional plugin partners, and wider integration of Bing Chat across Microsoft Copilots are the three major enhancements that Microsoft has provided for Bing.
Bing will now be ChatGPT's default search engine, allowing the bot to provide accurate and current information from all over the internet. The company asserts that going forward, ChatGPT replies will be supported by citation-rich search and web data. The improved experience will be made available to ChatGPT Plus members as of right now. Users will only need to enable a plugin to bring Bing to ChatGPT when it becomes available for free.
Soon, users of Bing Chat will have access to their conversations through a chat history that they can share and export. With this capability, users will also be able to access earlier chats in Bing Chat. Last but not least, Microsoft is allowing developers to create third-party plugins for the Bing Chat experience, much as the plugins that ChatGPT Plus users enjoy. For instance, according to the business, if you're looking up the newest restaurant for dinner in Bing Chat, it will use OpenTable to assist you in finding and making a reservation.
Microsoft Azures that Developers Can Build their Own AI-Powered Chat Assistant
Microsoft unveiled Azure AI Studio at its annual Build conference, a new feature within the Azure OpenAI Service that enables users to combine a model like OpenAI's ChatGPT or GPT-4 with their own data, whether text or images, and create a chat assistant or other type of app that reasons over the private data.
A copilot is a chatbot app, according to Microsoft, that employs AI to help with tasks like writing a sales pitch or creating visuals for a presentation. This AI is often used to generate text or images. Bing Chat is one of many similar apps that the company has produced. However, unlike copilots made with Azure AI Studio, its AI-powered copilots may not always be able to complete tasks using a company's proprietary data.
The process of creating a copilot in Azure AI Studio begins with choosing a generative AI model like GPT-4. The copilot is then given a meta-prompt, or a fundamental explanation of the copilot's responsibility and expected behavior. For the aim of keeping track of a dialogue with a user and responding with the relevant context and awareness, cloud-based storage can be added to AI copilots made with Azure AI Studio. Copilots can access data and other services from third parties thanks to plug-ins.
Microsoft is releasing upgrades that will increase capacity for high-volume users in an effort to further encourage the adoption of the Azure OpenAI Service. Customers of the Azure OpenAI Service can now reserve and deploy model processing capacity on a monthly or annual basis thanks to a new feature called the Provisioned Throughput SKU.
An AI Tool to Keep Online Safety in Check
The new service, called Azure AI Content Safety, is accessible through the Azure AI product platform and provides a number of AI models designed to find inappropriate content in both text and photos. The models, which are capable of understanding material in English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese, assign flagged content a severity score, letting moderators know what needs to be addressed.
Not Azure Service Fabric, A New End-to-End Data and Analytics Platform
Microsoft Fabric is a brand-new end-to-end data and analytics platform that is built around the company's OneLake data lake (and should not be confused with Azure Service Fabric). However, it can also access data from Amazon S3 and (soon) Google Cloud Platform. Additionally, it has integration tools, a Spark-based data engineering platform, a real-time analytics platform, and, with the help of the recently updated Power BI, an intuitive visualization and AI-based analytics tool.
Also, there is a new no-code developer experience that enables users to track their data in real-time and initiate notifications and activities depending on it. The integration between each of these technologies is strong, and Microsoft will undoubtedly also incorporate its AI Copilot into Fabric.
Cloud-hosted Developer Workstation to be Available Generally Starting July
Dev Box, a Windows-based developer workstation hosted in the cloud, will go broadly available in July, according to Microsoft. These machines will now be offered in a wider range of SKUs, with up to 128GB of memory and 2TB of storage, and 8 to 32 cores. Additionally, Microsoft is releasing new beginning images in the Azure Marketplace to make it simpler for developers to adapt these systems and the software that runs on them for their particular requirements.
Microsoft Edge for Businesses
Microsoft Edge for Business, a specialized workplace with unique aesthetic components, was also introduced by the business. To solve issues with hybrid work, The Edge for Business seeks to provide business management, security, and productivity capabilities. It's interesting how the browser preserves security and privacy while separating professional and personal browsing in distinct windows. To ensure data safety, IT specialists can implement Edge for Business controls and security settings. For today, it is under preview on controlled devices.
