Microsoft Outlook is an email and calendaring solution that can help you stay organized and productive. But given its vast array of features, it can be difficult to know where to start. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Outlook.

Ignore irrelevant conversations

Unnecessary group conversations can distract you from important emails. Luckily, Outlook’s Ignore feature can help you stay focused on what matters.

To activate this feature, select the email that you want to ignore, then click Home > Ignore > Ignore Conversation. If you accidentally ignore a relevant conversation, you can easily undo this action. Go to the Deleted Items folder, click Ignore, then select Stop Ignoring Conversation.

Tidy your inbox

Is the volume of emails in your Outlook inbox starting to feel overwhelming? Use the Clean Up feature to declutter your inbox and keep things organized.

To use this feature, click the Home tab from your inbox and select any of the three Clean Up options:

• Clean Up Conversation – removes redundant messages from an email thread or conversation
• Clean Up Folder – reviews conversations in a selected folder and removes redundant messages
• Clean Up Folder & Subfolders – reviews and removes redundant messages in a chosen folder and its subfolders

Highlight contacts

Want your message to stand out in a group email or meeting invite? Use the @Mention function to get the attention of a specific person. Simply type the @ symbol followed by the person’s name in the body of your email or invite message. For example, to @Mention John Doe, you would type @johndoe. The name you tag will be highlighted and automatically added to the “To” field of your message.

To find messages where you’re tagged, use the Filter Email option on the Home tab and click Mentioned.

Share links to files

Sending large files through email can be cumbersome. Outlook makes it simple by sending links instead. This not only saves space but also enables real-time collaboration on linked files.

To send file links, upload the file you want to send to your OneDrive account. Then In the email message, click Attach File > Browse web locations > OneDrive.

Insert notes in emails

Outlook lets you add sticky notes to emails for easy reference. To do this, highlight the text you want to add a note to, then click on the Add Note option in the pop-up menu. This will open a OneNote feed within Outlook where you can add text or images to your note.

Set a Teams meeting

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that integrates with Outlook. This integration allows you to create and schedule Teams meetings directly from Outlook, and to view, accept, or join meetings from either app.

Here’s how to schedule a Teams meeting in Outlook:

1. Go to the calendar view and click the New Teams Meeting tab.
2. Add individuals or contact groups in the Required or Optional fields.
3. Specify the topic, start time, and end time of the meeting. Outlook will automatically add the dial-in phone numbers and conferencing IDs to the meeting invite.
4. Compose a message inviting recipients to the meeting, then hit Send.

Share emails to Teams

You can share important emails from your Outlook inbox directly to a specific Teams channel with ease. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Choose the email you want to share.
2. Click Share to Teams.
3. In the pop-up menu, input the name of the person or channel you want to share with. You can also include attachments if needed by checking the “Include attachments” tickbox.

These are just a few ways you can use Outlook to get more done and stay organized. For more ways to maximize Outlook and other Microsoft products, get in touch with us today.

Microsoft Outlook stands out as a reliable choice for managing your emails, calendars, and tasks. Its user-friendly interface and powerful features make it a favorite among businesses of all sizes. In this guide, we’ll explore some handy Outlook tips that can help streamline your workflow and enhance your productivity.

Ignore irrelevant conversations

Unnecessary group conversations can distract you from important emails. Luckily, Outlook’s Ignore feature can help you stay focused on what matters.

To activate this feature, select the email that you want to ignore, then click Home > Ignore > Ignore Conversation. If you accidentally ignore a relevant conversation, you can easily undo this action. Go to the Deleted Items folder, click Ignore, then select Stop Ignoring Conversation.

Tidy your inbox

Is the volume of emails in your Outlook inbox starting to feel overwhelming? Use the Clean Up feature to declutter your inbox and keep things organized.

To use this feature, click the Home tab from your inbox and select any of the three Clean Up options:

• Clean Up Conversation – removes redundant messages from an email thread or conversation
• Clean Up Folder – reviews conversations in a selected folder and removes redundant messages
• Clean Up Folder & Subfolders – reviews and removes redundant messages in a chosen folder and its subfolders

Highlight contacts

Want your message to stand out in a group email or meeting invite? Use the @Mention function to get the attention of a specific person. Simply type the @ symbol followed by the person’s name in the body of your email or invite message. For example, to @Mention John Doe, you would type @johndoe. The name you tag will be highlighted and automatically added to the “To” field of your message.

To find messages where you’re tagged, use the Filter Email option on the Home tab and click Mentioned.

Share links to files

Sending large files through email can be cumbersome. Outlook makes it simple by sending links instead. This not only saves space but also enables real-time collaboration on linked files.

To send file links, upload the file you want to send to your OneDrive account. Then In the email message, click Attach File > Browse web locations > OneDrive.

Insert notes in emails

Outlook lets you add sticky notes to emails for easy reference. To do this, highlight the text you want to add a note to, then click on the Add Note option in the pop-up menu. This will open a OneNote feed within Outlook where you can add text or images to your note.

Set a Teams meeting

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that integrates with Outlook. This integration allows you to create and schedule Teams meetings directly from Outlook, and to view, accept, or join meetings from either app.

Here’s how to schedule a Teams meeting in Outlook:

1. Go to the calendar view and click the New Teams Meeting tab.
2. Add individuals or contact groups in the Required or Optional fields.
3. Specify the topic, start time, and end time of the meeting. Outlook will automatically add the dial-in phone numbers and conferencing IDs to the meeting invite.
4. Compose a message inviting recipients to the meeting, then hit Send.

Share emails to Teams

You can share important emails from your Outlook inbox directly to a specific Teams channel with ease. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Choose the email you want to share.
2. Click Share to Teams.
3. In the pop-up menu, input the name of the person or channel you want to share with. You can also include attachments if needed by checking the “Include attachments” tickbox.

These are just a few ways you can use Outlook to get more done and stay organized. For more ways to maximize Outlook and other Microsoft products, get in touch with us today.

Microsoft Outlook is a popular email and calendaring tool that is used by all types of businesses. It is easy to use and convenient, and it has many features that can help businesses manage their communications, projects, and contacts. Here’s how you can make the most out of Outlook.

Ignore irrelevant conversations

Unnecessary group conversations can distract you from important emails. Luckily, Outlook’s Ignore feature can help you stay focused on what matters.

To activate this feature, select the email that you want to ignore, then click Home > Ignore > Ignore Conversation. If you accidentally ignore a relevant conversation, you can easily undo this action. Go to the Deleted Items folder, click Ignore, then select Stop Ignoring Conversation.

Tidy your inbox

Is the volume of emails in your Outlook inbox starting to feel overwhelming? Use the Clean Up feature to declutter your inbox and keep things organized.

To use this feature, click the Home tab from your inbox and select any of the three Clean Up options:

• Clean Up Conversation – removes redundant messages from an email thread or conversation
• Clean Up Folder – reviews conversations in a selected folder and removes redundant messages
• Clean Up Folder & Subfolders – reviews and removes redundant messages in a chosen folder and its subfolders

Highlight contacts

Want your message to stand out in a group email or meeting invite? Use the @Mention function to get the attention of a specific person. Simply type the @ symbol followed by the person’s name in the body of your email or invite message. For example, to @Mention John Doe, you would type @johndoe. The name you tag will be highlighted and automatically added to the “To” field of your message.

To find messages where you’re tagged, use the Filter Email option on the Home tab and click Mentioned.

Share links to files

Sending large files through email can be cumbersome. Outlook makes it simple by sending links instead. This not only saves space but also enables real-time collaboration on linked files.

To send file links, upload the file you want to send to your OneDrive account. Then In the email message, click Attach File > Browse web locations > OneDrive.

Insert notes in emails

Outlook lets you add sticky notes to emails for easy reference. To do this, highlight the text you want to add a note to, then click on the Add Note option in the pop-up menu. This will open a OneNote feed within Outlook where you can add text or images to your note.

Set a Teams meeting

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that integrates with Outlook. This integration allows you to create and schedule Teams meetings directly from Outlook, and to view, accept, or join meetings from either app.

Here’s how to schedule a Teams meeting in Outlook:

1. Go to the calendar view and click the New Teams Meeting tab.
2. Add individuals or contact groups in the Required or Optional fields.
3. Specify the topic, start time, and end time of the meeting. Outlook will automatically add the dial-in phone numbers and conferencing IDs to the meeting invite.
4. Compose a message inviting recipients to the meeting, then hit Send.

Share emails to Teams

You can share important emails from your Outlook inbox directly to a specific Teams channel with ease. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Choose the email you want to share.
2. Click Share to Teams.
3. In the pop-up menu, input the name of the person or channel you want to share with. You can also include attachments if needed by checking the “Include attachments” tickbox.

These are just a few ways you can use Outlook to get more done and stay organized. For more ways to maximize Outlook and other Microsoft products, get in touch with us today.

In late July, Microsoft confirmed its ChatGPT-like Bing Chat was testing in third-party browsers like Chrome and Safari for select users after various reports had spotted the feature in action. Today, the company directly announced that Bing Chat would “soon” be available in third-party browsers, including both on the web and on mobile devices.

The news indicates Microsoft aims to compete on AI across platforms besides its own, in addition to those places where Bing Chat is already available, like the Bing mobile app and Microsoft Edge web browser. It would also put the AI chatbot up against other browser’s built-in tools, like Google’s generative AI search features, available in the Google mobile app and Chrome browser. 

“This next step in the journey allows Bing to showcase the incredible value of summarized answers, image creation and more, to a broader array of people,” Microsoft explained in its announcement of the coming features, which celebrates the 6-month anniversary of the AI-powered Bing. “You’ll get most of the great benefits of Bing and we’ll continue to optimize along the way to meet your needs across different browsers,” it read.

However, the company cautioned that, while the Bing Chat experience would work in users’ preferred web browsers, the “best” experience would be found in the Microsoft Edge browser.

During tests, for example, users noticed that Bing Chat in Chrome only supported five messages per conversation, instead of the 30 available in Microsoft Edge. It was also limiting the character count to 2,000, instead of the 3,000 supported by Edge.

Microsoft today hinted toward these limitations, adding that with Edge, users would “unlock longer conversations, chat history, and more Bing features built right into the browser.”

In the blog post, the company also celebrated several other recently launched features, including multimodal visual search in Bing Chat — meaning the ability to search using both text and images — a feature Google first introduced back in 2021. Bing’s model, however, leverages Open AI to allow users to input images into the Chat and then prompt the chatbot with related questions.

Microsoft additionally referenced the launch of Dark Mode for Bing Chat and the newly announced Bing Chat Enterprise, which includes commercial data protection for use inside organizations where sensitive data cannot leak out. A number of businesses have already banned employees from using consumer applications like ChatGPT due to data protection requirements, including Apple, Samsung, Walmart, Verizon and major banks, including Bank of America, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan.

The company also revealed a few milestones about Bing Chat to date, noting that it’s since seen over 1 billion chats and over 750 million images in the chatbot in addition to 9 consecutive quarters of growth on Edge.

An exact launch date for third-party browser support for Bing Chat was not provided, but the feature is said to be arriving soon.

Cloud growth has been slowing for a number of reasons this year. Some of it has to do with macroeconomic headwinds causing customers to look to cut their cloud bills, some of it with a maturing market, which comes with an inevitable decline in growth. With the Big 3 cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — reporting Q2 revenues, the quarter showed signs of life, even as AWS growth dropped to 12%.

Even with that decline, Synergy Research reports that Amazon, per usual, remains the market leader with little change in its market share numbers, maintaining a hefty lead over its rivals, with a pie that grew by $10 billion compared to last year to almost $65 billion. We’ll get to the details in a moment, but that adds up to over $247 billion for the trailing 12 months, a number so large, it’s actually hard to fathom just how huge this market actually is at present.

Synergy’s John Dinsdale says that although the market is slowing a bit, there are signs that it could improve in the coming quarters. “The growth rate in cloud spending continues to nudge down, driven by macroeconomic pressures, some belt-tightening by enterprises, local market issues in China, and, above all else, the law of large numbers,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

He points out, however, that the Chinese market could be normalizing some with macroeconomic pressures beginning to ease. The promise of generative AI and what it means to cloud vendors is also cause for optimism.

While Amazon, the largest and most mature of the big three vendors grew at just 12% in Q2, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud division, which includes Azure was up 15% with Azure alone up 26%, while Google grew the fastest at 28%.

Market share remained fairly steady with Amazon holding at 32% good for almost $21 billion in revenue. Microsoft came in second with 22%, good for $14 billion and finally Google had 11% worth $7 billion.

What does that mean in real numbers? Microsoft is twice the size of Google, and Amazon is almost equal to the combination of its two rivals. That’s pretty impressive in spite of slowing growth in the division. As Dinsdale continually points out, however, the law of large numbers takes over at some point and it’s hard to fight that. In spite of that, Amazon maintains an impressive lead over its rivals.

It’s worth noting that when Microsoft filed court papers related to the Activision Blizzard acquisition at the end of June, those documents include some data about infrastructure revenue that had some analysts adjusting Microsoft’s market share downward, but Dinsdale said that while it was certainly interesting, it didn’t appreciably move the needle on Redmond’s cloud market share based on Synergy’s models.

“The court documents referred to “infrastructure” revenue and not Azure. Some jumped to the conclusion that Infrastructure = Azure. While Microsoft has not publicly defined what is included in “infrastructure”, clearly it isn’t a simple one-to-one with Azure,” he told TechCrunch.

Per usual these numbers measure IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services, but not include SaaS, which is measured as a separate category.

Microsoft is shutting down its digital assistant app Cortana this month, having now put more of its focus on modern-day AI advances, like its ChatGPT-like Bing Chat and other AI-powered productivity features across Windows and its web browser Edge. A support page confirms the end of Cortana as a standalone app in Windows, starting in August 2023.

The company also confirmed to TechCrunch the page was first published earlier in June, but declined to share more of its thinking on the matter beyond what was referenced on the page itself.

However, reading between the lines from the explanation provided, it appears that Microsoft sees Cortana as something that was a stepping stone toward this new AI future, where users will instead rely on a smarter chatbot running GPT-4, powered thanks to Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. The company also announced in May that it would build this new ChatGPT-based Bing experience right into Windows 11.

In the meantime, Windows users will be in a transitional period where Cortana will still be around in some form, though the standalone Windows app will no longer be supported. For now, however, Cortana will continue to be available in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams display, and Microsoft Teams rooms, the company notes.

Those Cortana-powered experiences may not be long for this world either, as Microsoft has already detailed its plans to bring Bing Chat to the enterprise, where Microsoft 365 Copilot will be integrated into its productivity software, plus Outlook, Teams, and more.

“We know that this change may affect some of the ways you work in Windows, so we want to help you transition smoothly to the new options,” Microsoft explains on the support page. “Instead of clicking the Cortana icon and launching the app to begin using voice, now you can use voice and satisfy your productivity needs through different tools.”

The company then points users to Cortana alternatives like Windows 11 voice access which lets users control their PC with voice commands, the new AI-powered Bing, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Windows Copilot, which offers centralized AI assistance for Windows users.

The website Windows Latest (not affiliated with Microsoft) was the first to report on the Cortana app’s shutdown, having noticed that the latest update for the Cortana Windows app caused the app to stop working. Upon launching the app, a message informed users that “Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated” and pointed to the support page through a “Learn More” button.

Image Credits:

Microsoft’s shift to Bing Chat from its first-gen assistant Cortana may be later mirrored by other big tech companies.

This week, The Information reported, for example, that Amazon promoted its head scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, to run a team developing artificial general intelligence. That signals that Amazon, too, may be thinking about how Alexa could evolve into something more capable than the digital assistant it is today. Apple has also been developing its own generative AI tools, Bloomberg reported, but hasn’t yet decided how they would be released to customers.

AI may have found a center of gravity in the Bay Area, but we’re seeing a lot of activity elsewhere among those who believe that there is a market opportunity ensuring that the pace of innovation does not only get played out in just one corner of the world.

Today, SoftBank put in a bid for businesses and consumers in Japan with the launch of SB Intuitions, a new company that it says will “research and develop homegrown Large Language Models (LLM) specialized for the Japanese language.” SB Intuitions also plans to build and sell generative AI services based on Japanese.

The announcement was short on detail but for now, here’s what we know. SB Intuitions will be 100% owned by SoftBank itself — no call for or plans at this point for outside investors. SoftBank will only use data housed in Japan-based data centers — but no detail so far on how it will source the data and under what agreements. It is likely to tap into the company’s extensive consumer and enterprise operations in the country.

The earliest plans for this business were actually laid out in March of this year; but the SB Intuitions name and the company’s plans are only getting announced today. To operate the service, SoftBank will be tapping into another big AI effort at the company: a computing platform, built on NVIDIA GPUs, that “can be utilized for developing generative AI and other applications,” including academic research and enterprise services. That will be online before the end of March 2024, the company said.

Hironobu Tamba — a long-time SoftBank employee who has most recently been running the company’s AI and IoT division — will lead the new business, which is starting off with a paid-in capital sum of 150 million yen — or just over $1 million at today’s rates. That appears to be a basic sum to establish the business; SoftBank is not disclosing how much it is going to invest in the effort overall.

But considering that OpenAI has raised over $11 billion and is valued at nearly $30 billion as of its last raise this year, that gives you an idea of the sums of money needed by the most ambitious companies building LLMs and generative AI services.

SoftBank separately in its earnings presentation said that it would be issuing a new bond for 120 billion yen (just over $840 million) with some of the proceeds going to AI investments, so that could point to what it will be tapping for SB Intuitions in future.

It’s interesting and a little ironic to see SoftBank launching a new LLM business right now, given the hit-and-miss relationship SoftBank Group has had with AI over the years.

SoftBank the tech company presciently identified AI as an important area for development years ago, well before the current wave of AI hype started to take off. But it’s hard to find any evidence or success of the services it built in-house and the partnerships it forged to get that strategy off the ground. (Here is one example of what I mean. Whatever happened to this?)

The same might be said of its activity as an AI investor. Overall, SoftBank has been very, very bullish on investing in AI, with this article in the WSJ estimating that it had spent some $140 billion on some 400 investments over the years to play a role there. Its biggest effort as an investor by a wide margin has been the Vision Fund, which over multiple funds has raised more than $150 billion to invest in startups, with AI a huge focus. The WSJ’s conclusion from that, however, was damning: despite all that money spent, SoftBank is virtually cut out of the current wave of AI developments.

SoftBank’s efforts are targeted partly at that lost business opportunity but also a bigger, existential concept.

Just as search engines, operating systems, and the cloud have all been major milestones in how the world has engaged with the internet, “we believe that generative AI will be a technology of incomparable importance,” SoftBank CEO and president Junichi Miyakawa said in the presentation today.

“However, if you look at the current situation, the only major players developing large language models are foreign companies. These generative AIs are being developed based on English and Chinese data sets and information, and thought patterns based on these languages have been built up,” he added. “The significance of… a domestically-produced a generative AI is that it will be developed on Japanese language data set making it more suited to Japanese business practice and culture. In particular, we believe that it will be able to handle unique expressions in Japanese, such as those used in public and medical services.”

This work will not be carried out in a bubble. In fact, in the presentation today, Hironobu Tamba also highlighted that SoftBank has a strategic alliance with Microsoft that will involve SoftBank providing a secure data environment for enterprises in Japan that might be interested in working with Microsoft on AI, and generative AI, initiatives. SoftBank itself will also be using Microsoft’s Copilot service internally.

“We will not only develop our own large language models, but also establish a multi-generative AI system in which we select the most appropriate model for our clients’ needs from among multiple models developed by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and other companies,” said the CEO.

Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Bing Chat, is coming to non-Microsoft browsers, the company confirmed today following various reports of the AI chatbot being spotted in other browsers like Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari. The expansion will make Microsoft’s ChatGPT-like AI chatbot available to a broader set of users, as it was previously available to consumers only within Microsoft products, like the Bing mobile app and Microsoft Edge browser.

The company confirmed to TechCrunch that Bing Chat is expanding to other browsers, which hadn’t yet been officially announced.

“We are flighting access to Bing Chat in Safari and Chrome to select users as part of our testing on other browsers,” said Microsoft director of communications, Caitlin Roulston, in an emailed statement. “We are excited to expand access to even more users once our standard testing procedures are complete.”

According to those who gained access to the Bing AI chatbot on Windows, they received a pop-up in the Windows 10 or 11 taskbar, offering the opportunity to try the Bing AI in Chrome. Otherwise, users can head to Bing.com from their preferred browser, then click on the “Chat” icon to try out the experience. In our own tests, however, we could access Bing Chat in Chrome, but not Safari at this time. That could be because we’re not among the “select users” who were gaining access during the tests.

Image Credits: screenshot of Bing.com

Bing Chat’s ChatGPT-like experience is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, but some have reported that testing the AI chatbot in other browsers had more limitations than with the original version. For example, the blog WindowsLatest.com, which was the first to spot the expansion, noted that Bing Chat in Chrome supports only five messages per conversation, instead of the 30 available in Microsoft Edge. It was also limiting the character count to 2,000, instead of the 3,000 supported by Edge, the site said.

Microsoft declined to confirm these details or share any further information about the differences between the various versions of Bing Chat when we asked for more information. The company also wouldn’t confirm when the expansion to other browsers first began, which platforms were supported, or whether the tests would include users in global markets. That’s for us to discover in the days ahead, apparently.

In addition to adding support for Chrome and Safari, Bing Chat appears to be testing a native dark theme, too, but this is also not yet broadly available.

Bing Chat has been working its way into other Microsoft products following its launch earlier this year. In a matter of weeks, the new Bing arrived in the Bing mobile app and Edge browser for iOS, Android, and the desktop, in addition to being integrated with Skype. This month, Microsoft announced Bing Chat would also head into the enterprise with a version of Bing Chat that included business-focused data privacy and governance controls. Alongside that announcement, Microsoft also noted Visual Search, which lets the chatbot respond to questions about uploaded images, was rolling out, too.

Microsoft and Sony signed an agreement to bring Call of Duty games to PlayStation consoles. As a reminder, Microsoft offered to acquire Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. And yet, 18 months after the announcement, that acquisition hasn’t closed as several competition regulators have been concerned about the consequences on the gaming market.

That’s why today’s deal between Sony and Microsoft is an important milestone in this M&A saga. “We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and @PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer wrote on Twitter.

“From Day One of this acquisition, we’ve been committed to addressing the concerns of regulators, platform and game developers, and consumers. Even after we cross the finish line for this deal’s approval, we will remain focused on ensuring that Call of Duty remains available on more platforms and for more consumers than ever before,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith also wrote on Twitter.

Regulators have been concerned that Microsoft would only release Activision Blizzard titles on Xbox consoles (and potentially PCs) after the merger. In February, Microsoft signed a 10-year deal with Nintendo to bring Xbox games to Nintendo consoles, including Call of Duty games.

Shortly after that, the company also announced 10-year agreements with cloud gaming services, such as GeForce Now and Boosteroid. While the European Commission approved the merger, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) blocked the acquisition due to concerns for the cloud gaming market as Microsoft also maintains Windows, the leading desktop operating system, and operates a “significant cloud infrastructure.”

But now, Sony has finally agreed to sign a deal with Microsoft to bring some of Microsoft’s games to Sony consoles. Unlike the other agreements with Nintendo and cloud gaming services, Microsoft only mentions Call of Duty titles. The Verge confirmed with Microsoft that it is a 10-year commitment.

Sony has been reluctant to sign an agreement with Microsoft as the PlayStation maker hoped that authorities would block the acquisition of Activision Blizzard altogether.

Last week, a federal judge denied a preliminary injunction request from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). If Microsoft can find some form of resolution with the CMA, that court order should likely clear the way for the acquisition.

That’s likely why Sony changed its stance on a Call of Duty deal. There should be more news from Microsoft, the FTC and the CMA in the coming days.

Microsoft today announced a slew of new AI-powered shopping tools for its new Bing search engine and the Bing AI chatbot in the Edge sidebar. While a lot of the shopping features that Microsoft built into Edge over the years aren’t exactly fan favorites, this new set of tools actually looks useful.

Microsoft will now, for example, use Bing’s GPT-powered AI capabilities to automatically generate buying guides when you use a query like “college supplies.” It will automatically aggregate products in each category it comes up with, list their specs so you can compare similar items and, of course, tell you where to buy them (with Microsoft getting an affiliate fee when you buy).

Given that there is an entire ecosystem of sites that focus on these kinds of buying guides, it will be interesting to see how they will react to this change (and if Microsoft is doing this in Bing, Google and others will surely follow suit). Nobody is going to bemoan the end of the low-quality, SEO-optimized shopping content you often find when you try to compare different products, but this has the potential to hurt legitimate editorial operations, too.

The new buying guides in Bing are now available in the U.S. and the worldwide rollout for buying guides in Edge is starting today.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Another new feature Microsoft is launching worldwide today is AI-generated review summaries. As the name implies, this feature sums up online reviews of products. To use this, you simply ask Bing Chat in Edge to summarize what people are saying about a given product and it will generate a quick overview for you.

Also new is Price Match, a tool that will help you request a price match from a retailer, even after the price drops. “We’ve partnered with top U.S. retailers with existing price match policies and will be adding more over time,” Microsoft says (though it didn’t specify which retailers it is working with).

Image Credits: Microsoft

Microsoft brings new AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Microsoft today announced its roadmap for building its own quantum supercomputer, using the topological qubits the company’s researchers have been working on for quite a few years now.  There are still plenty of intermediary milestones to be reached, but Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s VP of advanced quantum development, told us that the company believes that it will take fewer than ten years to build a quantum supercomputer using these qubits that will be able to perform a reliable one million quantum operations per second. That’s a new measurement Microsoft is introducing as the overall industry aims to move beyond the current era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing.

“We think about our roadmap and the time the quantum supercomputer in terms of years rather than decades,” Svore said.

Last year, Microsoft announced a major breakthrough when its team first highlighted its ability to create Majorana-based qubits. Majorana qubits have the advantage of being very stable (especially compared to traditional techniques) but they are also extremely difficult to create. Microsoft made an early bet on this technology and now, a year after first announcing this milestone, the team is publishing a new peer-reviewed paper (in the American Physical Society’s Physical Review B) that establishes that it has indeed achieved this first milestone on its way to a quantum supercomputer. To get to this point, Microsoft showed results from more devices and far more data than a year ago when it first announced this work.

Image Credits: Microsoft

“Today, we’re really at this foundational implementation level,” Svore said. We have noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines. They’re built around physical qubits and they’re not yet reliable enough to do something practical and advantageous in terms of something useful. For science or for the commercial industry. The next level we need to get to as an industry is the resilient level. We need to be able to operate not just with physical qubits but we need to take those physical qubits and put them into an error-correcting code and use them as a unit to serve as a logical qubit.” Svore argues that to reach this point, it’ll take a quantum computer that can perform those one million reliable quantum operations per second and a failure rate of one per trillion operations.

The next step now is to build hardware-protected qubits — and Svore said that the team is making great strides in its work to build these. These qubits will be small (less than 10 microns on a side) and fast enough to perform one qubit operation in less than a microsecond. After that, the team plans to work on entangling these qubits and operate them through a process called braiding, a concept that has been discussed (mostly as a theory) since at least the early 2000s.

From there, it’s on to build a smaller multi-qubit system and demonstrate a full quantum system.

That’s obviously an ambitious roadmap and given how long it took Microsoft to achieve even the first milestone, we’ll have to wait and see how well the team can now execute. With IBM, IonQ and others aiming for similar results — but using more established methods for building their qubits — we’re in a bit of an arms race right now to move beyond the NISQ era.

In addition to sharing its roadmap, Microsoft today also announced Azure Quantum Elements, its platform for accelerating scientific discovery by combining high-performance computing, AI and quantum, as well as Copilot for Azure Quantum, a specially trained AI model that can help scientists (and students) generate quantum-related calculations and simulations.

Microsoft expects to build a quantum supercomputer within 10 years by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

While mostly a developer event, Build has long been where Microsoft puts a spotlight on consumer-centric updates to Windows. This year, the company is taking a different approach: It is highlighting the work it is doing to improve the developer experience on Windows. And we’re talking about major updates here — all of which will come to the Windows Insider dev channel this week.

GitHub Copilot X, for example, is coming to the Windows Terminal and the company is also launching a new extensible open source Windows app (Dev Home) that allows users to quickly set up their machines, connect to their code repositories and add widgets to track their projects or monitor their local machine’s performance.

Microsoft is also launching a new type of storage volume for Windows 11, Dev Drive, that is based on the same Resilient File System the company uses for Azure and that promises up to 30% performance improvements in build times. Essentially, this is the first time this file system is available for Windows client users, and thanks to cooperation with the Windows Defender team, Microsoft’s security tool can now scan these drives without blocking file operations.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of Windows seeing quite a bit of growth among developers (and especially Python developers). Microsoft says the number of developers who are using the platform increased by 24% last year. In part, this is driven by the arrival of the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

“In the last year, we’ve been listening to the community and seeing what’s the next set of things they really want us to do to improve the experience,” Michael Harsh, the group program manager for Microsoft’s Windows Platform team, told me. “Two key themes really emerged. The first one was that the pain of setting up an environment on Windows is a huge amount of toil. That’s a problem that’s existed as long as we’ve had visual installers — so kind of forever. And then, being able to improve the disk performance, especially for things like build times and working with package managers like Pip and NPM.”

To make it easier for developers to set up their machines, Microsoft now enables them to set up a WinGet configuration file to create unattended and repeatable configurations (WinGet is Microsoft’s command-line tool for managing and configuring Windows apps). This should make it considerably easier to onboard new developers to a new project and ensure that they use the right versions of their tools and frameworks. Harsh described it as adding orchestration to WinGet.

As for the Windows Terminal, the GitHub Copilot integration will be available to users who subscribe to the service through GitHub. It will offer both inline support as well as an experimental chat experience that can recommend commands, explain errors and even take actions in the Terminal app itself. Warp beat Microsoft to the punch here by integrating ChatGPT into its terminal a few months ago. Still, given that the Windows Terminal comes installed by default (it recently replaced the Windows Console as the default in Windows 11), Microsoft obviously has a lot of reach here.

Image Credits: Microsoft

To some degree, it’s Dev Home that’s bringing all of this together. The idea here is to build a single app that brings together all of the data and tools that developers need to manage Windows 11 as their development machine. This means they can use it to kick off these new WinGet configurations and configure their online Dev Boxes and GitHub Codespaces, for example, as well as set up the new Dev Drive and install new tools and packages, all without having to switch contexts.

There are also a few nice bonus features the company is quietly adding in the next Windows 11 release: You can now open tar, 7-zip, GZ and RAR files (among others) right from Windows Explorer without having to install any third-party tools. You can also now hide the time and date from the taskbar (useful for screen recordings).

Microsoft wants to make Windows a better place for developers by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch