Microsoft Looks Forward to Add OpenAI Technology to Office

Outlook may learn to generate texts for emails.

Microsoft wants to bring OpenAI technologies to the Office services, as The Information says, citing a source familiar with the plans of the corporation.

According to the source, the company plans to add AI to Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, and other applications. This will help users to create documents with stretches of automatically-generated text. For example, the service could generate an email for the user.

Microsoft probably won't be launching Office with AI soon. OpenAI will have to improve its technologies considerably. For example, after the release of ChatGPT, users have noticed that it often produces results that sound confident and plausibly right but are factually incorrect.

In addition, Microsoft will have to solve the issue of privacy protection. AI would work with users' mail and documents, so the bot has to be adapted for each one separately. The source claims that developers are already working on privacy practices for GPT-3 and GPT-4.

Microsoft can use OpenAI technologies for commercial purposes thanks to a significant investment in the developer. In 2019, the company invested $1 billion in an American startup. Earlier, sources claimed that Microsoft plans to use ChatGPT to improve the Bing search engine. The update is to make the service more competitive with Google so that users get better responses.

Google is in no hurry to integrate AI into the search engine and other services. The company worked on large language models (LLMs), but after the launch of OpenAI, it refused to publicly reveal its analog. The company explained this decision by reputational risks and high costs.

If Microsoft successfully uses OpenAI developments in its products, this could give it a competitive advantage over Google services, especially considering search engines and services for working with documents.