Day 2 of Microsoft Build began with a keynote address.

The talk opened with a reiteration of yesterday's topic: Copilot. Copilot is a set of services that interact with Microsoft products, providing artificial intelligence and allowing users to interact by entering text in a natural language, such as English. The speaker reiterated that technology works across applications, calling it "ChatGPT for the enterprise." We saw a demo of a Copilot plugin that interacted with multiple applications, passing data between them. It understood the context of each application and the relationship between each. A user asked a question of Copilot from within Teams, and Copilot responded by interacting with Outlook, Microsoft Graph, and Jira. The following demo showed Copilot allowing a user to interact with Viva sales using natural English sentences, thanks to Copilot.

Once again, we heard about Windows Copilot, which will be accessed from the Windows taskbar and will allow you to use AI to tie together multiple applications. Windows Copilot will allow you to summarize documents, rewrite text, or adjust desktop settings - all from your Windows desktop. This product will be in preview in June and part of Windows by "the holidays," according to the keynote.

About half the day two keynote focused on Copilot, and much of it repeated information released the previous day.

However, Microsoft showed off a few new products in the second half of the keynote, including

  • Dev Home - a centralized dashboard where you can manage dev environments, packages, projects, and repositories. It is currently in preview.
  • Dev Drive - a way to create a separate drive on your computer with increased performance and security. This is a feature of Dev Home.
  • Dev Box - high-performance cloud-based workstations for developers.

Here are a few more announcements of interest:

  • Windows will allow you to end a task without opening Task Manager
  • The Terminal will support "TearOuts," allowing you to manage multiple command line sessions better.
  • A Windows Subsystem for Android was announced
  • The Windows store will use AI to suggest appropriate keywords when you publish your app.

I found Wednesday's keynote less engaging than Tuesday's. There were a few demos, but most were too short to gain information. Also, the Day 2 speakers were not at the high level of Satya Nadella, Scott Guthrie, and Seth Juarez, who are among the business's best.

As I said in my previous post, do not interpret this article as an announcement from Microsoft. I am stating my own opinions based on what I heard or misheard today.