Microsoft wants its Copilot AI to be your personal shopper

During its largely AI-focused annual Surface event on Thursday, Microsoft announced that its generative AI assistant, Copilot, will also be available to help with shopping on Bing and Edge. Broadly speaking, the company plans to make Copilot a part of all its flagship products, including Windows, Edge and more. When it comes to shopping specifically, Copilot can help you decide on a style, locate a specific item and, of course, eventually buy it.

But the new launch may be more about playing catch-up with its competitors than actually innovating. Google Lens, for example, lets you find products to buy by just snapping a picture of them. That means you can find results that fit what you're looking for, even if you don't have the right words to type it in the search bar. Google even started using your data across the company's apps, including Lens, to help its Bard AI chatbot provide more relevant and actionable chatbot responses.

Copilot for shopping works by asking additional questions based on your search to provide recommendations specific to you. Using a photo or saved image to search with Copilot will be available soon.

Copilot AI will start rolling out to devices on September 26. Microsoft spent a significant portion of its event on Thursday talking about updates to the AI product. While it's currently a bit of a scattered setup, with different iterations on across Microsoft platforms, an update to Copilot will create a single generative AI assistant that spans across products.

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