Microsoft is making a lot of changes and doubling down on AI in its efforts to challenge competitors like Google and seems to have a good plan in motion. Of course, a part of these changes also includes rebranding since the company can never make up its mind about any of its own products.
The rebrand is something we saw coming as “Bing Chat” was a terrible name for its AI. We mentioned this back when the company dug a grave for Cortana in an attempt to move forward to its new Copilot idea. Pointing out that it should have simply upgraded Cortana instead of going with such a boring name like Bing Chat that sounds like nothing more than a customer service wizard for its search engine.
Sadly, Cortana is still dead and likely will never come back. But the company has, at least, chosen a better name for its AI by rebranding Bing Chat to Microsoft Copilot. It isn’t as cool as Cortana but it finally has a proper name for itself. Now you just have to hope that Microsoft plans to roll all of the other instances of “Copilot” together some how so that one “Copilot” reference isn’t completely unrelated to the other (ie, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Windows Copilot, etc).
Meanwhile, the good part in the company’s plan surrounds its new Windows AI Studio. A suite of tools for developers to help make it easier to build in AI into applications within the Windows environment. It focuses on SLM (small language model) AI and supports multiple AI solutions like Phi, Llama 2 and Mistral. This will likely become an attractive offer, stealing some attention away from the competition.
