Microsoft Ignite 2023: An Overview of the Most Important Announcements
Microsoft Ignite is a technology conference for developers and other IT professionals held annually by the company. This event typically showcases significant changes to Windows, Microsoft 365, and Azure. This year, the main emphasis was on artificial intelligence, which the company seeks to implement in all its products. Let us list a few important points highlighted at the conference.
Bing Chat has become Copilot
Microsoft has rebranded its AI chatbot, Bing Chat, and renamed it Copilot in Bing. Apparently, the company is thus bringing it out of the shadow of its search engine and giving it independence. The move is expected to strengthen its position in competition with ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. Copilot is available on Windows for free for those with an enterprise subscription.
Own chips with an emphasis on AI
Microsoft demonstrated 2 chips that were designed specifically for data centers:
- Azure Maia 100 (AI accelerator) – for training AI models and their further launch.
- Azure Cobalt 100 (processor) – for general workloads.
New AI tools in Copilot
Microsoft presented new artificial intelligence tools that expand the capabilities of Copilot:
- Copilot for Azure is a chat-controlled assistant for cloud platform clients.
- Copilot for Service is a tool for working with clients that answers the questions they ask most often.
- Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides is a mixed reality tool. It analyzes information useful to the employees and displays it in an understandable format, superimposing it in the form of a hologram on the equipment they serve.
- Copilot Studio is a service for designing your own chatbot. To create such an assistant, all you need is a description of how you want it to be in natural language.
Home AI decorator and voice isolation in Microsoft Teams
The “Decorate your background” feature, which will appear very soon in Microsoft Teams, will delight those who always do not have enough time to clean up their room or personal account. When making a video call, you can use generative background effects to entirely change the surrounding space. Artificial intelligence will analyze it, clean it, add interior items, plants, or decorate the background. In addition, Teams will also get an AI-powered noise reduction feature that will reduce the volume of background noise and muffle other voices.
Azure AI Speech for the creation of realistic human avatars
The Azure AI Speech tool is capable of transforming text into speech and creating a highly photorealistic animated human avatar. This program will be useful, first, to those who need a virtual assistant or conversational agent. Given concerns that an avatar might say things that a person has never said out loud (in other words, the risk of generating deepfakes), Microsoft developers assured that they had taken appropriate precautions.
The Microsoft Ignite 2023 conference demonstrated that the company has taken it to new heights and raised the bar in the IT field for other companies, introducing a number of cutting-edge innovations and useful updates. Its products today are focused not only on simplifying work but also on revolutionizing the user’s interaction with technology in everyday life.