Microsoft is building its whole ecosystem around one central concept: generative AI. Different versions of the company’s Copilot assistant have rolled out to different apps and services, including Microsoft 365 and Windows 11, but they’re all meant to be an omnipresent assistant that can help you get stuff done. Following the release of a standalone web app as an alternative to Bing Chat, Microsoft has now released an independent Copilot app for Android phones and tablets.
Microsoft has just quietly launched a Copilot app for Android smartphones. The app has been live for a week or so and was just recently spotted—Microsoft did not publish a blog post or anything to announce the new application. You could already use Copilot and Bing Chat (they are effectively the same app outside of corporate settings) in the Bing and Microsoft Edge apps, or as a chatbot in the Skype app, but this looks like a more streamlined experience without the added features of the other apps.
Just like the desktop version, the Copilot app will analyze images, text, generate images using DALL-E, and help you with things such as drafting documents, emails, and basically anything you need. It’s one of the top ChatGPT competitors out there, and more importantly, it lets you use the newer GPT-4 model for free. GPT-4 is only available on ChatGPT for paid users, whereas free users only have access to the older GPT-3.5 model.
This comes a short while after Microsoft decided to launch a standalone Copilot web version that’s separate from Bing. It’s a push by the company to break its AI away from Bing and into being one of the company’s core products, seeing as it’s also being integrated into seemingly every Microsoft service and app. OpenAI also recently launched mobile versions of ChatGPT for Android and iOS, so it’s definitely a segment Microsoft will need to go after, too.
Notably, Copilot is not yet available for iPhone as of the time of writing. It will likely be released soon, though, at which point Microsoft might choose to put out a blog post or just keep it lying low like it’s currently doing.
Source: The Verge
