Microsoft Surface And AI Event - All Major Announcements

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Artifical Intelligence surely has been the hot selling point for tech giants since the rise of conversational AI. Microsoft held its September Surface and AI even on Thursday, September 21st. The event focused on hardware refresh to the surface product line alongside further integration of Microsoft's AI assistance named CoPilot into more products and features. Here are the major announcements happened during the event:


HARDWARE ANNOUNCEMENTS

Surface Studio Laptop 2

Surface Studio Laptop 2

The star of the hardware was Surface Studio Laptop 2. This is the successor to the Surface Studio Laptop that was launched exactly 2 years ago. The original was a great idea but its 11th Generation Intel processors were already outdated. It also lacked port variety. 

Surface Studio Laptop 2 builds on the positives of the predecessor and added 13th Generation Intel processors and up to NVIDIA GeForce 4060 dedicated graphics card. The laptop also added a USB-A port and a MicroSDXC card slot. Pricing starts at $1999.99 for i7/512GB/16GB model with Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics chip.

 

Surface Laptop Go 3


 

Surface Laptop Go 3

Surface Laptop Go 3 retains the predecessor's form factor and got a spec bump. Microsoft claims Surface Go 3 is about 88% faster than Surface Go 2. The laptop weighs under 2.5 pounds and comes with 12th Generation i5-1235U processor which is a bit disappointing. The laptop comes with 256GB SSD alongside 8GB or 16GB LPDDR5 RAM. Microsoft promises up to 15 hours of battery life. The SSD is removable. Pricing starts at $799.99

 

SOFTWARE UPDATES

Windows 11 with CoPilot

Windows 11 is getting its next major update on September 26th. And Microsoft's AI-focused Copilot is the star of the feature packed update. The update will also bring redesigned File Explorer alongside the native support for RAR and 7-zip formats. The update will also bring ability to adjust volumes for app individually. 

 

Unified CoPilot

Microsoft is unifying CoPilot across its various apps and services. The purpose is to contextually personalize experience by incorporating data from Windows 11, Microsoft 365 and Edge and providing more better assistance and suggestions.

 

Bing Chat With DALL-E 3  

DALL-E 3 is the latest version of OpenAI's text to image generator. Microsoft is bringing it to Bing Chat for free which is definitely a huge boost to the current image generator. Bing Chat will also be getting more personalize by taking into considering a user's chat history to respond to follow-up questions. It is not clear if this is the latest version of the OpenAI's ChatGPT or not.


Microsoft 365 With CoPilot

CoPilot is coming to Office 365 apps this November. The service will cost an additional $30 per month per user. The Copilot would allow to quickly summarize documents, rewrite documents and quickly generate emails. We would definitely know more about this once it is available. It would be nice to see cost to benefit ratio to this feature and how the community accepts this price point.

 

Sources:

Microsoft 

 

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