Microsoft is reportedly testing the input of OpenAI's ChatGPT technology in Outlook to enhance search results so that users will no longer need to struggle with keyword searches when looking up emails.
According to reports, Microsoft has already implemented an unknown version of OpenAI's GPT text-generation in Word's autocomplete feature and is working on extending its use to Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
As OpenAI's own creation, ChatGPT has been making headlines last year for its ability to interact conversationally with complex questions, providing human-quality responses in a breakthrough feat of AI advancement. ChatGPT is a natural language processing service that lets users have human-like conversations and generate answers across a variety of topics.
Amongst others, the software is widely used by students to summarize key points of a video lecture, write lyrics to songs, solve equations, and generate cover letters for job and college applications. It's a great way to improve writing efficiency, but the integration of the AI chatbox could raise a number of issues, including but not limited to information accuracy.
For example, the freemium version of ChatGPT has garnered a bad reputation for presenting inaccurate information as fact, which can cause problems for content creation and misinformation. Another issue is rooted in privacy, as reports of the software being used by malicious data miners have been cropping up.
In answer to these, Microsoft researchers have reportedly been working on privacy-preserving models and figuring out ways to reduce errors.
For now, there is no saying when the AI software will be coming to Microsoft's productivity tools, or even if it ever will. What we do know currently is that Microsoft has a big stake in OpenAI, and the company already has plans to add a text-to-image AI in their search engine, Bing, which may end up challenging Google's superiority over Internet search engines.
