MicrosoftIn recent years, it has invested heavily in the field of artificial intelligence and reached a multi-billion dollar cooperation with OpenAI to integrate artificial intelligence technology into its services and products. As one of the important results of the cooperation, the artificial intelligence assistant "Copilot" (formerly Bing Chatbot) has landed on the Windows 11/10 operating system, Microsoft Edge browser and Bing search engine. According to Microsoft in its recent earnings call, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence technology, the number of daily active users of Bing search has exceeded 140 million.
However, Microsoft's ambitions seem to have suffered a setback. In a poll conducted by the Windows Central website, more than half of users said they had never used Windows 10. Windows 11 Microsoft seems to have realized this and decided to suspend the promotion of the Copilot feature of Win11.
In the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview 26120.461 (KB5037009), Microsoft said: "Over the past few months, we have been trying out different Copilot experiences for internal testers in the Canary, Dev, and Beta channels. These new features include making Copilot run like a normal application window, and the taskbar icon lighting up animations based on providing assistance when copying text or images.But after careful consideration, we decided to pause the rollout of these new features in order to further optimize them based on user feedback.Copilot will continue to work as it does in Windows, and we’ll continue to explore new ideas with developers.”
The reason why Microsoft paused the advancement of the Copilot feature is unclear, but officials said it would make improvements based on user feedback. This move also contradicts Microsoft's previous claim that ChatGPT is not better than Copilot, but Copilot is not currently being used correctly by users. Even more puzzling is that after the EU antitrust regulator forced Microsoft to strip Teams from the Office 365 suite, the company even dispatched some staff from the Teams chat application to assist in the development of Copilot.
Microsoft's use of artificial intelligence in the Windows operating system, including the Copilot feature, has been met with mixed reviews. For example, Microsoft has tested a "smart wizard"-style launch method that summons Copilot by tapping the taskbar, and a method of launching Copilot by swiping right on touch devices, but the latter prevents users from viewing the notification center, causing a lot of dissatisfaction.
Microsoft's willingness to optimize existing Copilot features based on user feedback rather than blindly launching new features without solving existing problems is commendable. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles this situation in the future and how it will affect the user experience of Copilot.