Google made headlines a short time ago for a plan to expand its Gemini prompt box as it combines AI and search. Microsoft is taking a different tack: it’s also dynamically expanding its prompt box, but with an eye towards improving its productivity apps instead.
Right now, Microsoft’s efforts are traversing the outer reaches of its productivity solar system, being tested internally with a few targeted corporate partners, Fast Company reports. Eventually, they’ll plunge inward into its enterprise Copilot implementations, before reaching the sun: the consumer business.
It sounds like a step ahead. I’m less concerned about the size of the prompt box, though it’s amusing that Microsoft is following Google into the hot new trend in the AI UI space. But Microsoft is also apparently working to apply intelligence to the prompt box itself, with targeted, contextually aware suggestions beyond the generic “Learn,” “Create,” and other generic, vanilla suggestions lurking beneath the prompt box. If you’re working within Word or PowerPoint, you’ll see relevant suggestions suited to both the task at hand as well as the application you’re working within.
Even better, you’ll be able to select a “read-only” approach toward Copilot interactions. Recently, Microsoft began allowing the versions of Copilot built within its productivity applications to suggest and then enact edits to the document. I’ve found that to be extremely handy in certain cases — Excel, for example — where I couldn’t find some hidden little formatting control that I wanted to tweak.
Having established what I wanted, however, I certainly would want those changes to be “locked in,” preventing Copilot from making further changes. I’m not sure you’ll be able to explicitly control that interaction — perhaps a toggle? — but it’s worth considering.
Microsoft also plans to allow you to lock Copilot to a specific section of a document, preventing it from making additional changes. I assume that this will be done by highlighting and then right-clicking the content, but we’ll have to wait and see.
In March, Microsoft conformed that the company is bringing its commercial and consumer versions of Copilot under the same leadership, presumably unifying its design language as well. That makes sense; consumers have become fatigued of the multiple versions of Copilot, both within Windows as well as its productivity applications like Microsoft 365.
Quite frankly, this all sounds like the deep breath productivity AI needs. The last two years have seen a land rush of AI companies trying to establish themselves as the AI service, with some real backlash from consumers and workers feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of AI applications. If AI is going to become part of our daily workflow — and not just coders — users need to have the time and space to figure out if and where it’s helpful, and to wave it away when it isn’t.
