Microsoft has various ideas for using ChatGPT: the tool could be used to beef up its search engine against Google. But it would also be a great crutch for writing emails and filling out Word documents.
Microsoft’s artificial intelligence battle plan goes far beyond interfacing ChatGPT to its Bing search engine. It now appears that the American company intends to soon open other fronts to deploy this conversational agent. The goal: to develop the capabilities of its ecosystem of software and services.
This is the website The Information which reports on Microsoft’s plans, in a report published in early January. The Redmond firm intends to use the performance of the tool even more widely – which is proving to be very good at communicating with Internet users, thanks to its use of natural language and advanced algorithms in the field of artificial intelligence.
Two axes emerge: Microsoft is considering on the one hand the arrival of ChatGPT in its Office office suite (we are talking in particular about Word and PowerPoint). And, on the other hand, the group would also like to articulate it with Outlook, its messaging client. Other applications could also open to ChatGPT to automate tasks that are currently manual.
ChatGPT in Outlook to write your emails for you?
For Microsoft, it is also a way to align or exceed Google in this or that area. We know for example that the Mountain View firm offers with Gmail the possibility of automatically filling in replies to e-mails with formulas inspired by the e-mail received. These are the “smart responses”, which have been in place since 2015.
The answers offered by Google in Gmail are basic and are mainly limited to polite expressions and short proposals, such as “Welcome! “, “Thanks for the photos”, “Beautiful”, “Great idea”, “It is ordered”, and other variations. Sometimes proposals do not quite fit with the content of the mail or with the nature of the correspondent.
With Microsoft Outlook, one could imagine a ChatGPT capable of generating more extensive responses, based on the history of exchanges – which raises issues of confidentiality and privacy, since one would then open one’s correspondence to a utility text analysis. He could then offer emails with a few more elaborate lines than what Google offers.
ChatGPT has already shown its ability to write texts, sometimes quite long, despite relatively short instructions. He could also offer to expand it, to embellish it with a richer lexical field, to suggest several answers according to the tone that we want to give and so on. ChatGPT could also be a powerful search tool to find an email or an attachment.
Still, going from theory to practice is not won. In addition to the questions of confidentiality which will inevitably be raised with such an interconnection (and this also applies to the Office suite, in particular if sensitive documents are handled in this context), there is also the quality of the rendering which will be closely assessed: however, with ChatGPT, it is contrasted.
It is indeed one thing to make a chatbot available in a “sandbox” environment to ask them all kinds of questions and see how they react. It’s quite another to deploy it in commercial and operational products and services, which are used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
