UK tech pub The Register reports on Microsoft’s Surface/AI event, and reckons AI is spreading into every part of Microsoft’s product line:

Borrowing Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s robot tagline, “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With,” perhaps would have been too much of an intellectual property risk even for a firm that has offered to indemnify paying customers using its litigation-bait code-generating chat.

Citing its history of building AI copilots – rendered in lower case as if this aviation metaphor has become the accepted vernacular for disclaimer-encumbered machine learning models – the Windows biz said Microsoft Copilot will arrive in Windows 11 on September 26 and in Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365 later this year.

“Today we take the next step to unify these capabilities into a single experience we call Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion,” declared Yusuf Mehdi, corporate VP and consumer chief marketing officer, in an announcement coinciding with the launch of various Microsoft Surface hardware. More on that below.

“Copilot will,” Mehdi continued, “uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront.”

But what Microsoft means by AI depends upon context. The Windows 11 Paint application, for example, has been bestowed with background removal capabilities – something that prior to recent image recognition advancements was something of a chore when done manually. The app also includes a preview of Cocreator, which adds text-to-image capabilities based on OpenAI’s DALL-E model.

The Photos app likewise has been enhanced with AI-assisted Background Blur.

Copilot in Windows is a bit less specific. Microsoft says its helper code “empowers you to create faster, complete tasks with ease and lessens your cognitive load – making once complicated tasks simple.”

Read the full article here.