Apple Inc.’s iMessage and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine, Edge web browser and Advertising service will avoid strict new European Union rules reining in Big Tech platforms. A probe concluded that the services don’t hold a dominant enough position to be regulated under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the European Commission announced on Tuesday. Apple and Microsoft said they welcomed the decision in separate statements following the announcement.
The decision from EU regulators is a win for the two US firms, which would have been obliged to adapt their services to meet a swathe of new obligations and prohibitions designed to limit market power abuses. The decision confirms an earlier Bloomberg News report that the services would escape the scope of the tech crackdown.
The EU’s DMA strikes at the heart of the business models of six of the world’s most powerful technology firms deemed to be digital “gatekeepers.” While some of their services are now set to be exempt, Microsoft and Apple — alongside Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. — will still face a raft of new obligations aimed at preventing them from abusing their dominance in other parts of their business.
For Microsoft this includes its Windows operating system for PCs and LinkedIn social media platform. For Apple, it includes its iOS mobile operating system, App Store and Safari browser.
Under the law, it will be illegal for the designated firms to favor their own services over those of rivals. They’ll be barred from combining personal data across their different services, prohibited from using data they collect from third-party merchants to compete against them, and will have to allow users to download apps from rivals platforms.
The new rules are set to fully come into play on March 7.
India is gradually but consistently marching ahead in its blockchain and Web3 exploration. While the country is still working on formulating crypto rules and conducting trials over its eRupee CBDC, India’s IT ministry has a new plan for launching a homegrown Web browser. This Indian Web browser will be packed with Web3 capabilities. The idea is to incorporate elements of blockchain into this browser to make the platform ready to handle the next iteration of Internet as well as its use cases.
India’s IT ministry has launched a contest called the Indian Web Browser Development Challenge this week. The contest will have a total of three rounds, and at the end of the third round the winning participant(s) will be awarded a prize of $410,685 (roughly Rs. 3.4 crore).
Officials from India’s IT ministry, including ministry secretary Alkesh Kumar Sharma, flagged off this contest on August 9.
The aim of the competition is to get India’s developer talent to create a homegrown Web browser for India, hoping to reduce our reliance on established foreign players like Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge among others.
As part of the advanced features that this browser is expected to get, Indians could soon be able to digitally sign documents using crypto tokens. Official information about this functionality have not been revealed in detail yet.
While India only allows crypto trading and holding for now; its plans of embedding crypto in a homegrown Web browser seems like a positive indication to the country’s Web3 industry. Members of the crypto industry in India have time and again highlighted that the country’s engineering talent and a general tech-savvy aptitude could make it a hub for Web3 projects.
By December this year, India could unveil a set of crypto laws, that could work on a global level. As the current president of the G20 group, India is working closely with other nations as well as international financial bodies to draft elaborate rules to oversee the volatile digital assets industry.
The Bill, which comes after six years of the Supreme Court declaring ‘Right to Privacy’ as a fundamental right, has provisions to curb the misuse of individuals’ data by online platforms.
As per Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, this law will give Indians the right to correct their data. It also puts a timeline on the duration any data that is stored with entities. The law is estimated to come into motion within ten months.
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Microsoft has integrated an AI-powered image generator that uses DALL-E technology into its Bing chatbot recently. Now, the tech giant has widely rolled out the AI tool dubbed Bing Image Creator on desktops for Edge users. Arranged in the sidebar panel in the Edge browser, the new tool would allow users to create pictures based on their text prompts and the Image Creator will offer four different image options to choose from. Microsoft has also added other new features to Edge, including a Drop tool that lets users access all the content they want to share with themselves and a new efficiency mode that displays battery performance.
Microsoft, via a blog post on Thursday, announced the arrival of new features to its Edge browser. As mentioned, OpenAI’s DALL-E-powered AI image generator is now available on desktop for all Edge users. This feature will create pictures based on text prompts and can be accessed right from Microsoft Edge’s sidebar. Based on the prompt, the new Image Creator will offer four different image options to choose from. After selecting an image, users can download it and add it to their document or upload it to social media. First time users have to enable the Image Creator by clicking the ‘+‘ icon on the Edge sidebar. Microsoft Edge is claimed to be the first and only browser with an integrated AI image generator.
Additionally, Microsoft has added a new Drop feature in Edge. This allows users to share photos, notes, documents, and more between devices in one thread. This functionality is available on Edge on PC, Mac, iOS and Android. The Drop feature can be accessed from the sidebar or using drag-and-drop to add content.
Further, Microsoft Edge has received another feature that lets users edit and save Web images without using additional tools or apps. Users would be able to crop, adjust lighting and colour, and add filters to web images from the browser itself. The edited image can be saved for later use without leaving the browser window.
Furthermore, Microsoft has improved the Edge efficiency mode feature in the latest release to provide better battery life and more control over how the device consumes power. With the latest update, the laptop minimizes power usage when users are not interacting with the browser.
Smartphone companies have launched many compelling devices over the first quarter of 2023. What are some of the best phones launched in 2023 you can buy today? We discuss this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Microsoft is fusing ChatGPT-like technology into its search engine Bing, transforming an internet service that now trails far behind Google into a new way of communicating with artificial intelligence.
The revamping of Microsoft’s second-place search engine could give the software giant a head start against other tech companies in capitalising on the worldwide excitement surrounding ChatGPT, a tool that’s awakened millions of people to the possibilities of the latest AI technology.
Along with adding it to Bing, Microsoft is also integrating the chatbot technology into its Edge browser. Microsoft announced the new technology at an event Tuesday at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
“Think of it as faster, more accurate, more powerful” than ChatGPT, built with technology from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI but tuned for search queries, said Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft executive who leads its consumer division, in an interview.
A public preview of the new Bing launched Tuesday for desktop users who sign up for it, but Mehdi said the technology will scale to millions of users in coming weeks and will eventually come to the smartphone apps for Bing and Edge. For now, everyone can try a limited number of queries, he said.
The strengthening partnership with OpenAI has been years in the making, starting with a $1 billion (roughly Rs. 8,300 crore) investment from Microsoft in 2019 that led to the development of a powerful supercomputer specifically built to train the San Francisco startup’s AI models.
While it’s not always factual or logical, ChatGPT’s mastery of language and grammar comes from having ingested a huge trove of digitised books, Wikipedia entries, instruction manuals, newspapers and other online writings.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday that new AI advances are “going to reshape every software category we know,” including search, much like earlier innovations in personal computers and cloud computing. He said it is important to develop AI “with human preferences and societal norms and you’re not going to do that in a lab. You have to do that out in the world.”
The shift to making search engines more conversational — able to confidently answer questions rather than offering links to other websites — could change the advertising-fuelled search business, but also poses risks if the AI systems don’t get their facts right. Their opaqueness also makes it hard to source back to the original human-made images and texts they’ve effectively memorised, though the new Bing includes annotations that reference the source data.
“Bing is powered by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible,” is a message that appears at the bottom of the preview version of Bing’s new homepage. “Make sure to check the facts.”
As an example of how it works, Mehdi asked the new Bing to compare the most influential Mexican painters and it provided typical search results, but also, on the right side of the page, compiled a fact box summarising details about Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Jose Clemente Orozco. In another example, he quizzed it on 1990s-era rap, showing its ability to distinguish between the song “Jump” by Kris Kross and “Jump Around” by House of Pain. And he used it to show how it could plan a vacation or help with shopping.
Gartner analyst Jason Wong said new technological advancements will mitigate what led to Microsoft’s disastrous 2016 launch of the experimental chatbot Tay, which users trained to spout racist and sexist remarks. But Wong said “reputational risks will still be at the forefront” for Microsoft if Bing produces answers with low accuracy or so-called AI “hallucinations” that mix and conflate data.
Google has been cautious about such moves. But in response to pressure over ChatGPT’s popularity, Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday announced a new conversational service named Bard that will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before being widely released later this year.
Wong said Google was caught off-guard with the success of ChatGPT but still has the advantage over Microsoft in consumer-facing technology, while Microsoft has the edge in selling its products to businesses.
Chinese tech giant Baidu also this week announced a similar search chatbot coming later this year, according to Chinese media. Other tech rivals such as Facebook parent Meta and Amazon have been researching similar technology, but Microsoft’s latest moves aim to position it at the centre of the ChatGPT zeitgeist.
Microsoft disclosed in January that it was pouring billions more dollars into OpenAI as it looks to fuse the technology behind ChatGPT, the image-generator DALL-E and other OpenAI innovations into an array of Microsoft products tied to its cloud computing platform and its Office suite of workplace products like email and spreadsheets.
The most surprising might be the integration with Bing, which is the second-place search engine in many markets but has never come close to challenging Google’s dominant position.
Bing launched in 2009 as a rebranding of Microsoft’s earlier search engines and was run for a time by Nadella, years before he took over as CEO. Its significance was boosted when Yahoo and Microsoft signed a deal for Bing to power Yahoo’s search engine, giving Microsoft access to Yahoo’s greater search share. Similar deals infused Bing into the search features for devices made by other companies, though users wouldn’t necessarily know that Microsoft was powering their searches.
By making it a destination for ChatGPT-like conversations, Microsoft could invite more users to give Bing a try, though the new version so far is limited to desktops and doesn’t yet have an interface for smartphones — where most people now access the internet.
On the surface, at least, a Bing integration seems far different from what OpenAI has in mind for its technology. Appearing at Microsoft’s event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the “the new Bing experience looks fantastic” and is based in part on learnings from its GPT line of large language models. He said a key reason for his startup’s Microsoft partnership is to help get OpenAI technology “into the hands of millions of people.”
OpenAI has long voiced an ambitious vision for safely guiding what’s known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence, a not-yet-realised concept that harkens back to ideas from science fiction about human-like machines. OpenAI’s website describes AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
OpenAI started out as a nonprofit research laboratory when it launched in December 2015 with backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. Its stated aims were to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
That changed in 2018 when it incorporated a for-profit business Open AI LP, and shifted nearly all its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT model for generating human-like paragraphs of readable text.
OpenAI’s other products include the image-generator DALL-E, first released in 2021, the computer programming assistant Codex and the speech recognition tool Whisper.
Samsung’s Galaxy S23 series of smartphones was launched earlier this week and the South Korean firm’s high-end handsets have seen a few upgrades across all three models. What about the increase in pricing? We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Microsoft at the Build 2022 developer conference has announced a list of updates that are aimed to make Windows, Edge, and Teams better productivity solutions. The software giant announced a slew of Microsoft Store updates including the ability to serve ads and allowing users to restore apps when they switch to a new PC to give developers ways to make their apps more discoverable and retain their users. Additionally, Microsoft partnered with Qualcomm to introduce Project Volterra as a new mini-PC to help developers build cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
Windows updates
Windows 11 has been one of the biggest focus areas for Microsoft since its launch in October last year. Although the new operating system has refreshed user experience with features including centre-aligned Start menu and widgets, the Redmond company is bringing improvements to those features to enhance user experience.
At this year’s Build virtual conference, Microsoft announced that it is soon introducing the ability to view apps available on the Microsoft Store directly using the Windows Search on Windows 11 PCs. The feature will initially be available to Windows Insiders and is aimed to allow developers to make their apps discoverable, without distracting users from their flow. Users will see a Get from Store button for each app listing they see on their search results to install apps of their choice, without requiring them to access the Microsoft Store.
Windows 11 is getting the ability to look for apps available on the Microsoft Store directly from search Photo Credit: Microsoft
Windows 11 users are also getting a feature to let users automatically restore their apps directly from the Microsoft Store. “This will also help developers retain their customers without having to remind customers to re-download their app,” the company said.
The feature to let users restore their apps will initially be available for testing in the Windows Insider channel in the coming future.
Microsoft is also expanding the Amazon Appstore preview to run Android apps on Windows 11. Currently live in the US, the preview is reaching five additional countries, namely France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The expansion will take place by the end of the year, the company said.
Additionally, the Windows maker has introduced Microsoft Store Ads to help developers run ad campaigns directly in the Store. It will help Microsoft to expand revenues coming from its Store and allow developers to improve discoverability of their apps.
Ads in the Microsoft Store will start appearing through a pilot based on Microsoft Advertising that will run soon, the company said.
Microsoft has also removed the waitlist programme for Win32 apps in the Microsoft Store and is opening it to all app developers. The update will particularly help increase the number of apps available on the Store for download on Windows 11 systems.
Alongside Microsoft Store-centric updates, Microsoft at Build 2022 announced support for third-party widgets on Windows 11. The company said that developers would be able to start building widgets as “companion experiences” for their Win32 and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) on Windows 11 beginning later this year. The new experience will be backed by Microsoft’s Adaptive Cards.
Windows 11 is enabling developers to create widgets of their native apps Photo Credit: Microsoft
OneNote is also getting an updated visual design that will look and feel and will have pen and voice functionalities inspired by Windows 11. There will be modern visuals to deliver a fresh user experience. The note-taking app will also get AI capabilities to recognise inputs from voice in the form of dictations, images using the inbuilt camera of the device, and via handwriting through a stylus pen.
Microsoft Edge updates
While saying goodbye to Internet Explorer next month, Microsoft is improving user experiences on the Edge to fill in the gap left by its legacy browser and make the new offering a competitive option against Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari.
One of the biggest changes that Microsoft Edge has received among the Build announcements is the general availability of WebView2 for WinUI 2 and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). The new embedded Web control is built on top of the Microsoft Edge Chromium platform.
Citing performance insights from Cerner Corporation, Microsoft said WebView2 helped deliver improvements including 85 percent reduced render time, 33 percent lower CPU utilisation, and 32 percent less memory utilisation over the traditional solutions available on Internet Explorer.
Microsoft is also enhancing PWAs on the Edge browser by enabling new APIs and improving their notifications. The company said that the underlying improvements will enable notifications coming from PWAs to appear as coming from a native app. Users will also be able to access features including the native platform’s share UI to share files on a PWA.
Microsoft is enabling PWAs to have system’s native UI for sharing files Photo Credit: Microsoft
Additionally, Microsoft is adding the ability for users to find PWAs alongside native apps in the Microsoft Store.
The Apps page in Microsoft Edge has also been updated with an improved interface. Microsoft has additionally developed a new Apps Hub experience and enabled app sync across devices in the Edge browser to improve user experience.
Microsoft Edge is also receiving a simplified DevTools interface that brings a new compact and customisable Activity Bar. This will bring over 30 tools to help personalise workflows for developers.
Microsoft Teams updates
Microsoft Teams at this year’s Build conference has received a feature called Live Share that will allow users to share apps in their virtual meetings. It will help co-watch, co-edit, and co-create in Teams meetings, the company said.
Developers will get new preview extensions through the Teams SDK to let them create Live Share experiences for their apps. Initially, companies including Frame.io, Hexagon, Skillsoft, MakeCode, Accenture, Parabol, and Breakthru have built their experiences on the new feature.
In addition to Live Share, Microsoft has introduced the Azure Communication Services sample app builder to let developers create and deploy a sample application for virtual appointments. Users will be able to use the sample app to book appointments and join a Teams meeting.
Microsoft has announced the general availability of the new Teams SDK that will help developers build apps for Teams, Outlook, and Office using a single application and deployment model.
Developers offering apps for Microsoft Teams will also be able to start giving freemium versions of their offerings as Microsoft has introduced in-app purchasing within its video conferencing solution.
App development-focussed updates
At this year’s Build conference, Microsoft has announced Power Apps with the ability to generate a working low-code app from inputs such as Figma design files, PDFs, paper forms, and even a picture of a hand-drawn app. The company has used cognitive AI technology to enable Power Apps to scan the inputs and produce working app controls. The apps created by the new experience will also have data storage.
Microsoft also partnered with Qualcomm to introduce Project Volterra — a new developer kit based on the Snapdragon compute platform. It is aimed to help developers build new AI apps using the Qualcomm Neural Processing SDK for Windows toolkit. The mini-PC carries a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to process AI algorithms natively.
Microsoft has introduced Project Volterra for developers to create new AI apps Photo Credit: Microsoft
Exact details on the launch of Project Volterra are yet to be revealed. However, Microsoft said that the system will be coming later this year.
This week on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast, we discuss the Surface Pro 8, Go 3, Duo 2, and Laptop Studio — as Microsoft sets a vision for Windows 11 hardware. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
Microsoft appears to be currently testing an additional security layer for the Edge browser called Edge Secure Network, which offers a built-in VPN powered by Cloudflare. The new layer of security and privacy to the browsing service was recently spotted on the support page of Microsoft’s website. With a detailed introduction of the Microsoft Edge Secure Network feature, the support page also mentions ways in which it provides additional security. For now, there’s no telling when the feature will arrive.
The Microsoft Edge Secure Network VPN service is not available to users yet. Its support post, spotted first by XDA Developers, details that it will come with a monthly 1GB free data limit with the user’s Microsoft Account. To keep an account of the data that has been used/left in a month, one can turn on the shield icon. It also reflects the date for the auto renewal of data. As of now, the company has not given any details on subscription fee for data usage beyond 1GB.
However, it appears to be similar to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service. In the support post, Microsoft has also given a glimpse of how the Microsoft Edge Secure Network will function to ensure privacy. The proxy uses limited diagnostic and support data, which is automatically deleted every 25 hours. This helps to keep the user safe by keeping important details away from prying eyes, even on public Wi-Fi networks.
While the Edge Secure Network feature is not yet available, the post details how to use it. One has to sign into their Microsoft account, and then go to Settings and More > Turn on Microsoft Edge Secure Network to enable the feature. To ensure your browsing experience is protected, you can check the shield icon in the browser frame. However, the feature will turn off once you close Microsoft Edge. The user needs to turn it on again on their next browsing session.
When you sign in to Microsoft Edge using a Microsoft account, the data will be synced automatically. This includes browsing history, favourites, settings, data saved to fill forms, passwords and extensions. However, one can also choose to turn the sync on and off individually for each data type.
This week on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast, we discuss the Surface Pro 8, Go 3, Duo 2, and Laptop Studio — as Microsoft sets a vision for Windows 11 hardware. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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