Microsoft Build 2023: New AI tools, plugins and integration of Bing and ChatGPT

Tech giant Microsoft is holding its annual Build conference this week in Seattle and, like every year, a barrage of announcements are expected. Major announcements have started coming in even before CEO Satya Nadella's keynote has begun. And, much on the expected lines announcements regarding AI tools are on top of the list.

The company has made three major announcements - integration of Bing Search into ChatGPT, a common plugin platform with OpenAI and introduction of new plugin partners along with expansion of integration of Bing ChatGPT across Microsoft Copilot.

The company has announced that its search engine Bing will now be the default search experience for ChatGPT, enabling the bot to offer answers from across the web. The company also said that it is adopting the same open plugin standard that OpenAI introduced for ChatGPT. This move will enable interoperability across ChatGPT and Microsoft’s copilot offerings.

Microsoft's copilot is an application that uses AI and large language models to assist its users with cognitive tasks. This was launched nearly two years ago with GitHub, which helps developers in their daily work exercises.

By enabling interoperability across ChatGPT and Bing, the AI bot will be able to undertake tasks like finding and booking a restaurant reservation using an OpenTable plugin, for example, the company said in a statement.

The company has also announced expansion in the plugin ecosystem. "As part of this shared plugin platform, Bing is adding to its support for plugins. In addition to the ones previously announced for OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha, it will also have Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Redfin, TripAdvisor and Zillow among many others in the Bing ecosystem," the company explained.

In addition, developers will now be able to extend Microsoft 365 Copilot with plugins. Plugins for Microsoft 365 include ChatGPT and Bing plugins, as well as Teams message extensions and Power Platform connectors – enabling developers to leverage their existing investments, it further added.

Plugin is like a bridge between a large language model that was trained on public data from the internet and all the data that a company may keep privately about its benefits, it gives the copilot access to those files when it answers a question from an employee at the company.

“A plugin is about how you, the copilot developer, give your copilot or an AI system the ability to have capabilities that it’s not manifesting right now and to connect it to data and connect it to systems that you’re building,” Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer said.

According to Scott, "While Microsoft has deployed generative AI technology into the company’s products and services, developers will eventually build most of the copilots in the world."

As Scott explained, the company expects more versions of copilots to build by users and so at Build, they also introduced new tools to simplify the development of the said copilots.

For example, with the new Azure AI Studio, developers can ground conversational AI models on their private data. With a new capability called Azure OpenAI Service on their data, developers can uncover organization-specific insights from data, text and images using natural language-based application interfaces, Microsoft explained.

Also read: Build 2023: Microsoft unveils Fabric, a unified data analytics platform integrated with Power BI