Microsoft is adding new Copilot AI features for its first birthday, and more are coming

As we mentioned earlier, today is the one-year anniversary of Microsoft publicly announcing its generative AI efforts. Those efforts have since been developed under the Copilot branding for the most part. In a new interview with The Verge, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, revealed some new features that are being added to Copilot today and hints about what is to come.

One of the big efforts at Microsoft for improving Copilot is its image creation tools, which recently has come under some scrutiny due to the claim that its Designer AI service was used to make explicit images of Taylor Swift that later went viral. Today, Mehdi stated that Copilot's image generation features can now blur the background of an AI-made image. It can also highlight some objects and can even add some different effects like pixel artwork.

According to Mehdi:

Image creation is one of the things that’s really resonating. I think it’s the first step in unlocking the ability for people to feel like they can be a creator again.

Microsoft stated today that since its AI chatbot launched to the public a year ago it has generated 5 billion chats. Mehdi told The Verge that about 70 percent of those chats were for searching for information.

Medhi also says that while Copilot branding has been added to a number of services in the past year, eventually users will only see one Copilot. He stated that if people wanted to pay for Copilot Pro or Copilot for Microsoft 365, then Copilot could just "add capabilities as you subscribe to them." Indeed, earlier this week, Copilot for Microsoft 365 changed so users can now simply access it via Copilot on Windows desktops.

He added:

So the notion of a personal Copilot that is yours, we want to get to one idea, and we want that to unlock everything you’ve got with your IDs, with your personal IDs and work IDs.

The future of Copilot on Windows could allow for owners of PCs with AI-based NPUs to possibly run local large language models on their systems. Mehdi also says AI could allow Windows PC owners to use more of the features on their personal computers that they have not accessed before. He said::

It sounds cliche, but what I think that will unlock in terms of people’s ability to use computers to do amazing things will be quite profound.

While the first year of Microsoft's AI efforts has been extremely busy we should see even more Copilot and other generative AI features from the company in its second year and beyond.