Microsoft integrates ChatGPT into Bing, unveils AI assistance

Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley highlights Microsoft's move to integrate ChatGPT into its search engine Bing, a new AI assistant feature for Windows 11, and also comments on Apple's plans to unveil its AR headset at its 2023 World Wide Developers Conference.

Video transcript

- And while the White House charts the path forward on AI, Microsoft is expanding the AI ecosystem to its platforms. Here with more on the details is Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley. Dan, a lot of announcements coming through that certainly could lead to AI assistants while using Microsoft products.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, that's one of the main products that they announced is this new Window's copilot. What they're basically saying is a new kind of AI assistant for Windows 11. It's something that'll live in the taskbar. You'll open it up.

And then on the right side of the screen, it'll show up there. And you'll be able to interact with it, ask it questions like you would Bing chat, but then also ask it to do things like adjust some of the settings in Windows. It can pull in information from other apps and quickly summarize them for you. You can drop a file in there, and it'll do that. Anything that you really can think of right now when it comes to chat bots, this can do it and more.

And so this is one of the bigger announcements we've seen. Microsoft previously had Cortana. That kind of got the axe. This is clearly going to replace that or it has replaced that. That was done off a while ago.

But they also announced a few more pieces of software. That includes the Azure AI studio. That's something where companies will be able to take their own data and dump it into a kind of copilot chat bot and create their own. It's basically Microsoft saying a kind of app that you would be able to use.

So if you are a company and you offer your employees multiple health plans and your particular employee you're looking for the health plan that covers classes, you'll be able to type in, "Show me the health plan that covers eyeglasses," and it'll spit that out for you. This way, you don't have to go through a ton of documentation. You're able to get exactly what you need right from that. So that's one of the other developments that we saw.

And then finally, the big announcement, maybe one of the most important announcements is that ChatGPT-- the base search engine, the default search engine-- is now going to be Microsoft's Bing. So that means that they'll have Bing in front of more eyes. It'll be the default out of the box for subscribed ChatGPT plus users.

And then free users will have to turn on a plug in, but then they'll just be able to use Bing as the default. That's big because Microsoft says that if they get just 1% of market share in the search market, it could be worth as much as $2 billion in revenue. So if they get it in front of more people, all the better.

- Certainly would be huge for them. We know that they've been struggling to gain any of that market share. Dan, there was also a big announcement from Apple today unveiling some details around its next WorldWide Developers Conference next month. What should we expect?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, WWDC is going to be on June 5. That's going to be in Cupertino. They're going to have a live event as well as streaming online. And they showed off kind of a little app teaser GIF of the SWIFT logo, but it looks like a kind of like lens goes over it. And it's you think hinting at the idea that they'll eventually have their AI or sorry, their VR-AR headset. And that's something that's been really heavily rumored to be coming at WWDC. It could be $3,000

Look, the AR-VR headset space has not been doing particularly hot. I mean, it's not exactly falling apart. But it's been kind of overtaken the idea of the metaverse by generative AI at this point. So if there's anyone that can breathe life into it and then actually get people more interested in it, it would be Apple. So we'll find out on June 5.