Microsoft Build 2024: everything announced

Microsoft had a lot to say about Windows and AI — and a little to say about custom emoticons – during the Build 2024 keynote. The company, like almost everyone in the industry, is striving to get AI into every nook and cranny it can find. This means Copilot watches your screen to help you play Minecraft or giving you AI agent co-workers.

The entire event lasted over two hours, but you can check out the highlights below.

Microsoft says Copilot AI agents could soon be used as something like virtual employees that companies can use for menial tasks like monitoring emails, performing a series of automated tasks, helping with employee onboarding, or entering data , all without being asked to do so. . The company says Copilot’s new skills won’t take over jobs — just the boring parts. (Isn’t “data entry” a complete job description for some people?) The new feature will be coming to Copilot Studio in preview later this year.

The company launched Phi-3-vision, a new version of the Phi-3 AI model announced in April. It’s multimodal and can read text and view images, but it’s a language model that’s small and compact enough to work on a mobile device. Image analysis is one of the big use cases that AI companies have been pushing, and smartphones are as ideal a place to use it as anywhere else. Phi-3-vision is part of Microsoft’s family of Phi-3 models that the company announced in April and is now available in preview.

Microsoft’s Edge browser is getting an AI-powered real-time video translation feature that can dub videos from sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, Reutersand Coursera. The feature works with multiple languages, offering translation from Spanish to English or vice versa – or from English to German, Hindi, Italian and Russian. Microsoft says the feature is “coming soon” and that more languages ​​and video platforms will be added in the future.

Get ready for some disco parroting and clippings of your teammates in Microsoft Teams because the company is adding the ability to add your own emoji to Microsoft’s Slack competitor. Just like Slack, admins can limit who is allowed to add emojis, and they won’t be visible outside of your organization’s domain. They will come in July.

Qualcomm’s roughly Mac Mini-sized $899 Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows has a Snapdragon X Elite chip inside. It also has 32GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and lots of ports, although it’s unclear whether anyone can buy it.

You’ll soon be able to use Microsoft’s File Explorer to keep track of your coding projects, as the company is integrating Git into the file system browser. The company claims that developers will be able to track the status of files, confirm messages and their current branch in File Explorer. Additionally, the app now natively supports 7-zip and TAR compression.

Microsoft’s new Advanced Paste feature is now available as part of the PowerToys suite for Windows 11, offering the ability to convert your clipboard contents as you go. You’ll be able to bring up the Advanced Paste menu by pressing Windows Key + Shift + V, and from there convert your paste into formats like plain text, markdown, or JSON using other keyboard shortcuts. You can also convert by typing in the prompt box, which has other features such as changing or summarizing the text before pasting it. The catch: You’ll need an OpenAI API key and credits to your OpenAI account for the AI ​​part.