What’s new from Microsoft Ignite 2024

Microsoft’s annual development and IT conference, Microsoft Ignite, kicked off this morning, with announcements ranging from updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot to a new bug bounty event for AI vulnerabilities. 

Here is a list of some of the highlights from the event: 

Microsoft 365 Copilot updates

The company announced several new capabilities across Microsoft 365 Copilot. Now in private preview, Copilot Actions is a new feature that allows users to automate everyday tasks, such as getting a daily summary of meeting actions in Microsoft Teams, or getting an email that summarizes what was missed upon returning from a vacation.

The company also announced several new agents in Microsoft 365, such as agents in SharePoint that are tailored to each SharePoint site, and are grounded on that site’s files and folders. 

A new Teams agent called Interpreter allows for real-time, speech-to-speech translation in Teams meetings. This agent also features the option to simulate the user’s own voice in the translation. 

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Business Chat provides employees answers to common policy questions related to HR and IT, such as understanding their benefits or how to request a new laptop.

Finally, there is an agent that takes meeting notes in real-time in Teams and one that automates project management in Planner. 

Azure AI Foundry

Microsoft also announced Azure AI Foundry, which provides access to Azure AI services and tooling.

Azure AI Studio is turning into Azure AI Foundry portal, which will provide an interface for discovering AI models, services, and tools. It now features a new management center experience that provides a single dashboard for viewing and managing subscriptions. 

The Azure AI Foundry SDK provides a toolchain for designing, customizing, and managing AI apps, including 25 prebuilt app templates. 

And finally, Azure AI Agent Service, will allow developers to orchestrate, deploy, and scale agents. 

Zero Day Quest

As part of the company’s Secure Future Initiative, it is announcing Zero Day Quest, a new bug bounty event focused on AI and cloud security. This will exist in addition to Microsoft’s existing $16 million annual bug bounty program, and the largest prize pool will be $4 million. 

“We know that the threat landscape is rapidly evolving, and it’s imperative that we stay ahead of bad actors. At Microsoft we believe that security is a team sport, and we are stronger when we partner as a security community to share information, collaborate and stop bad actors,” Microsoft wrote in a post. 

New imaging APIs in Windows Copilot Runtime

Finally, the company also announced four new imaging APIs in Windows Copilot Runtime, its platform that allows developers to integrate AI capabilities into the Windows operating system.

The new APIs include image super resolution for enhancing clarity of blurry images, image segmentation for separating the foreground and background of an image, object erase for erasing unwanted objects from an image, and image description for providing a text description of an image. 

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