This week, we’re delving into two recent Microsoft updates that have garnered significant attention: Designer and Co-Pilot. These innovations bring exciting enhancements to the Microsoft ecosystem. By following the links provided within the articles, you’ll gain access to both tools and explore their capabilities firsthand.

Copilot

Copilot seamlessly merges the immense capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with your personalized data from the Microsoft Graph. Before we go further, I think we need to understand what LLMs are.

Large Language Models are sophisticated Artificial Intelligence models designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input they receive. These models are built using deep learning techniques and are trained on vast amounts of text data. They can process and comprehend human language, generating coherent and contextually relevant responses at record speeds.

Many of these models are versatile and can be employed for a variety of tasks, including language translation, text summarization, content generation, sentiment analysis, and more. They’ve gained significant attention due to their ability to understand and generate natural language text that’s coherent, contextually appropriate, and often indistinguishable from text written by humans. (Crazy, right?)

How does Copilot fit into this? Well, it encompasses a wide array of information including your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more, all seamlessly integrating with the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. The idea is that your productivity goes through the roof with Copilot guiding the choices you make and streamlining your task.

In our current landscape around the business world and even in education, we are often consumed by repetitive work tasks, leaving only a fraction for the pursuits that ignite our creativity and bring joy to our work. Check out this video to learn more about Copilot.

Designer

In the realm of creative design and Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft 365 introduces Microsoft Designer. This dynamic tool is going to simplify you and your students ability to create an array of graphics, spanning from the smallest logos to captivating blog banners and engaging social media posts. We know that our students are all over social media, whether we want them to be or not, we need to prepare the students to create high quality work with A.I (Artificial Intelligence). assistance. In the past you would have completed these tasks using applications like Word or Publisher, it’s important to note that Designer stands alone as a distinctive application tailored for your design needs.

What truly sets Designer in a league of its own is its integration of the groundbreaking DALL-E 2 technology by OpenAI. You might be asking what is DALL-E 2? A quick introduction is

DALL-E and DALL-E 2 are computer programs created by OpenAI. They can take sentences that describe pictures and turn those sentences into actual pictures. The first version, DALL-E, debuted in January 2021. It’s based on another program called GPT-3, which is used for generating human-like text. DALL-E uses a modified version of this program to make pictures instead of text. Then, in April 2022, OpenAI introduced DALL-E 2. It’s like a newer version of the same program. The main improvement from what I can tell is that DALL-E 2 is better at making pictures that look real. It can also mix different ideas, features, and styles to create images that are more detailed and lifelike. And these pictures can be much clearer because they have more details when you zoom in.

I think the greatness of Designer is that the user can infuse their own creativity and individuality into every design. The canvas is yours to command, enriched by an array of tools, resources, and features. There is a treasure trove of templates, shapes, photographs, icons, text styles, and color themes, each waiting to be transformed by your ideas into your latest visual masterpieces. Watch the video below to learn more about Designer.

Let me know your thoughts and opinions below? Do you think SkyNet is next or is this just another set of tools to improve your efficiency?