Microsoft Ignite 2023: all the AI news from Microsoft’s IT pro event

While Microsoft Teams has long offered a variety of virtual backgrounds, this decoration feature will work in a real-world room, much like the augmented reality filters you find on Snapchat. It can even add plants, lights, and seasonal objects to the background behind you. We’ll have to see how this functions in reality, but if it works as well as the GIF below, then it could be a good option to hide your messy background and avoid the fake-looking virtual ones.

Loop lets you use flexible, collaborative workspaces and pages to make it easier to cooperate on work. If you’re familiar with Notion’s interface at all, Loop looks and feels remarkably similar — right down to the ability to easily access a bunch of tools and formatting options by typing the forward slash key (which pulls up what Microsoft calls the “insert menu”).

The new Microsoft Planner experience will first be available within the Planner app in Microsoft Teams in spring 2024, with a web experience to follow later that year. The existing Tasks by Planner and To Do apps in Microsoft Teams are being renamed to just “Planner.” Microsoft Project for the web is also expected to be renamed Planner in the “coming months,” though Microsoft says existing users will be able to access the same features following the update.

Windows AI Studio allows developers to access development tools and models from the existing Azure AI Studio and other services like Hugging Face. It also offers an end-to-end “guided workspace setup” with model configuration UI and walkthroughs to fine-tune various small language models (SLMs), such as Microsoft’s Phi, Meta’s Llama 2, and Mistral.

It’s a big shift in Microsoft’s original vision for Mesh — an entire platform built on top of Azure that Microsoft hoped developers would tap into — but then a lot has changed with Microsoft’s VR / AR ambitions over the past few years. Microsoft’s HoloLens boss, Alex Kipman, left the company last year following misconduct allegations. Six months later, Microsoft shut down AltspaceVR, the social VR platform it acquired in 2017, amid layoffs affecting its mixed reality division.

Microsoft has added some flexibility to the chatbot’s output, so users can tweak it with instructions to make its formatting and tone more to their personal liking. Word and PowerPoint will get the new personalization features to start, but the company says other Microsoft 365 apps will gain support in time.

Microsoft initially talked up the Google search competition for its AI ambitions earlier this year, but it now looks like it has its sights set on ChatGPT instead. The Bing Chat rebranding comes just days after OpenAI revealed 100 million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis. Despite a close partnership worth billions, Microsoft and OpenAI continue to compete for the same customers seeking out AI assistants, and Microsoft is clearly trying to position Copilot as the option for consumers and businesses.