Microsoft has reportedly been experimenting with building OpenAI’s language AI technology into its Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook apps. The information reports Microsoft has already included an unknown version of OpenAI’s text-generating GPT model in Word’s auto-complete feature, and is working on integrating it further into Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
Microsoft has reportedly used OpenAI’s GPT technology to improve Outlook’s search results so that users can find what they’re looking for without having to search with keywords in emails. Microsoft also reportedly looked at how these AI models could suggest replies to emails or recommend document changes to improve Word users’ writing. It’s not clear if Microsoft plans to launch these features, or if it’s just an experiment for now.
If Microsoft leans more towards building functionality present in ChatGPT, the conversational AI that made headlines last year, Outlook could compose entire emails from simple questions. Imagine that Outlook writes an email to your colleagues explaining that you are not feeling well, based purely on a question “write an email to my team explaining that I am sick”. Microsoft is also reportedly planning to launch a version of Bing that uses ChatGPT to answer search queries. This new feature could be available as early as March, in an effort to make Bing more competitive with Google.
Microsoft faces challenges building GPT into Office apps
Microsoft faces many challenges to bring more advanced AI text generation features to its productivity apps. The most important of these is accuracy. ChatGPT still tends to present incorrect information as factwhich would make any type of document creation or advanced integration difficult.
The other big hurdle is privacy. Microsoft will need to customize its models for individual users without putting their data at risk. The information reports that Microsoft has been working on privacy protection models using GPT-3 and the unreleased GPT-4. Microsoft researchers have reportedly had early successes in training large language models on private data.
Microsoft could use these models to scrape and summarize information from Teams Meetings transcripts, then add images generated from OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 image generation model to PowerPoint presentations. Researchers reportedly presented their Office integration work to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, but it’s not clear if or when these GPT or Dall-E 2 powered models will be available in Office products.
Microsoft is already using different types of AI in its productivity apps. Word and PowerPoint automatically suggest captions for images and slides using AI algorithms, Microsoft Teams uses AI to improve echo, breaks, and acoustics, and Microsoft built an AI-powered autocomplete for code using GPT-3 two years ago . Microsoft Editor also makes your writing better by using AI to perform spell checking, grammar checking and text predictions.
Microsoft bought an exclusive license to the underlying technology behind GPT-3 in 2020 after investing $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. It has since built a deep relationship with OpenAI, including plans to add an AI text-to-image model to Bing powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.
“AI is going to reinvent the way you do everything on Windows,” Panos Panay, Microsoft’s head of Windows and Surface, said on stage at CES last week. Microsoft’s Surface team has been willing to build new hardware to take advantage of AI, including the new Surface smart camera. Several members of the Surface team recently discussed the impact AI will have on Windows and hardware Forget interview.
If Microsoft continues with GPT-powered versions of Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint, it will mean rapid commercialization of OpenAI’s GPT models. Bing looks set to join PowerApps (Microsoft’s first commercial use case of GPT) soon with its own AI-powered search results. Both Office and Bing integration of OpenAI’s language models would put a lot of pressure on Google, which dominates search and is coming in with its Workspace offering for businesses.
