Everything Announced at Microsoft Build 2024

Microsoft just concluded Build 2024, its annual developer conference. The company announced a few brand-new releases as well as shiny new features for their existing products. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella presented the keynote. Here are a few highlights from the 2-hour event.

Microsoft introduced Copilot AI agents, which the company claims can be used as virtual employees to complete tasks like monitoring emails, carrying out automated tasks, helping with employee onboarding, and data entry. The features will be available through the Copilot studio later this year. The company was also quick to assure viewers that these features will not take over any jobs as its capabilities are limited to menial tasks.

Microsoft also unveiled Phi-3-vision, a new iteration of the Phi-3 AI model, which the company announced back in April. It’s a multimodal language model that can read text and view images, but it’s also small and lightweight enough to run on a mobile device. One of the main applications of AI that businesses have been promoting is image analysis, and smartphones are the best platform for using them. Microsoft unveiled the Phi-3 family of models in April, and Phi-3-vision is one of them. It is currently accessible in preview.

The company is also making its Edge web browser smarter by adding AI-powered real-time video translation to it. It can dub videos from platforms like YouTube, Linkedin, Coursera, etc. The languages that are currently supported are Spanish, English, German, Hindi, Italian, and Russian. According to Microsoft, the feature is “coming soon” and will support more languages and video platforms in the future.

Additionally, The Windows clipboard will soon have generative AI capabilities powered by OpenAI models, and the Microsoft Team meeting app will soon allow users to create and share custom emojis.

The PowerToys suite for Windows 11 now includes Microsoft’s new Advanced Paste feature, which allows you to convert the contents of your clipboard as you go. By pressing Windows Key + Shift + V, you can open the Advanced Paste menu and use additional keyboard shortcuts to convert your paste to other formats, such as plaintext, markdown, or JSON.