Microsoft Could Be Bringing ChatGPT To Word, Powerpoint, Other Office Apps

Microsoft’s productivity apps could soon get more productive, and it’s all thanks to the conjuring abilities of artificial intelligence.

The company is said to be adding ChatGPT’s language-processing tools to Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other programs in the Office suite, according to a report by The Information, which says it received intel from multiple sources familiar with the upgrade. With integration of the powerful OpenAI platform, Microsoft apps would allow users to instantly “generate text using simple prompts.”

For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is an open-source chatbot that interacts in a natural, conversational way. You can ask it questions or make requests in sentences, and it will hit back with full, humanlike responses—even in the format of a research paper, if that’s what’s suggested in your brief. The machine is trained to yield unique answers each time.

In the case of Outlook, ChatGPT could help return more useful search results when a user looks up a query in their inbox. It can predict the sort of emails a customer is searching for even if they didn’t use the relevant keywords to prompt them, sources told The Information.

ChatGPT can also craft entire passages in emails as instructed in prompts, as well as suggest automatic replies and recommend edits so that the message you send won’t be too heavy on the jargon, a feature that language checkers like Grammarly are also capable of.

The extent to which this AI tool will be incorporated into Word, where ChatGPT’s language-understanding abilities will likely shine the brightest, remains to be known. These are some tricky waters Microsoft will be treading; as soon as ChatGPT became publicly available, it was promptly exploited by students to write their assignments for them. The report says the program could help rewrite documents for clarity, or even create complete documents from scratch.

The safest way we can see ChatGPT being utilized for Word is if it started out by restricting GPT abilities to a digital support assistant à la Clippy. However, a more ambitious Microsoft will have to find ways to prevent imminent cheating incidents if it chooses to allow the automatic ghost-writing of essays right away.

All told, OpenAI is currently pushing safeguards to help people identify if a body of text is “AIplagiarized”—that is, composed by ChatGPT but falsely passed off as a human’s own work. One solution is by “fingerprinting” or watermarking essays with secret sequences that can be deciphered by experts.

The news comes just days after speculations that Microsoft is adding ChatGPT support to Bing, potentially giving the search engine an AI-boosted edge over Google.

Generative AI is a force that tech giants have been quick to harness, since it far accelerates the efficiency their offerings are touted to possess. In a similar vein, Microsoft’s new Microsoft Designer software features free access to text-to-image creator DALL-E, powering designs for presentations, invitations, social media graphics, and more in seconds.

When Microsoft will bring ChatGPT support on board is still up in the air.

[via Thurrott and The Information, cover photo 258483612 © 777ers | Dreamstime.com]