During Microsoft Ignite, the company also announced some interesting results from a study it conducted on the use of the Copilot tool it released earlier this year. 70% of respondents said Copilot helped them improve their productivity. 64% said it helped save time when working with emails, 87% said it was useful when creating a draft, and 75% said it was useful when finding information in files.

“What everyone wants to know now is: Will Copilot really change work, and how? Our research, using a combination of surveys and experiments, shows the productivity gains are real,” Frank X. Shaw, chief communications officer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

Copilot updates across Microsoft’s portfolio
For Microsoft 365 users, Copilot now offers added features such as personalization options, a comprehensive whiteboarding and note-taking experience for meetings, and the option to utilize Copilot’s transcription services during meetings without the transcript being saved.

Microsoft is introducing a new tool called Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code solution that empowers users to customize Microsoft Copilot. This tool enables the integration of business data and the creation of custom copilots tailored for specific purposes.

Moreover, Microsoft is extending Copilot into mixed reality on the HoloLens 2, ensuring seamless integration into workers’ workflows. This mixed reality version utilizes natural language and human gestures to provide interactive guidance.

In addition, Microsoft is introducing specialized versions such as Microsoft Copilot for Service to assist contact centers and Microsoft Copilot for Azure to support IT teams.

As part of this update, the rebranding of Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise to Copilot has also been announced. This move aims to streamline and unify the experience across Microsoft’s services.

Azure AI receives several enhancements
The new Model-as-a-Service feature allows developers to seamlessly integrate and customize AI models using their own data without the need to manage the underlying GPU infrastructure.

The Vector Search feature, facilitating the storage, indexing, querying, filtering, and retrieval of AI data, is now generally available.

In the upcoming public preview in Azure OpenAI Service, the GPT-4 Turbo model will be introduced by the end of this month. Furthermore, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision is set to be in preview soon, while DALL·E 3 is already available in preview.

The company has also announced the general availability of Azure AI Content Safety, aiding organizations in detecting harmful content in AI experiences. Additionally, new documentation has been released, offering guidance on how to avoid potential content infringement.

New chips optimized for AI
The company has unveiled two new chips, namely Microsoft Azure Maia and Cobalt. Microsoft Azure Maia serves as an AI accelerator designed for executing cloud-based training and inferencing for AI workloads. On the other hand, Microsoft Azure Cobalt is an Arm architecture chip tailored for general-purpose workloads, emphasizing performance, power efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

Furthermore, the company has made Azure Boost generally available. This system optimizes performance by offloading storage and networking processes from host servers to hardware and software specifically optimized for these tasks.

Microsoft has also emphasized collaborations with AMD and NVIDIA. Azure will soon incorporate AMD MI300X accelerated virtual machines, and Microsoft’s NC H100 v5 Virtual Machine Series is configured to leverage NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

According to sources, the National Basketball Association, known as the NBA, and Major League Baseball (MLB) have questioned partnering with ESPN if Disney’s goal is to reduce or replace payments to the leagues for rights to broadcast ESPN’s equity sports shows.

Disney executives and league officials are aware that discussions about a potential strategic partnership are still in the “idea” phase. According to sources who requested anonymity to CNBC, the talks have not had many specifics, but are likely to heat up as ESPN tries to reach a rights renewal agreement with the NBA.

And while Disney tries not to go bankrupt, the streaming division of the media giant continues to lose money.

The sports agreement seems to be one way for the company to improve its situation. Agreeing to a deal in which ESPN swaps stock for sports rights could save Disney billions of dollars to use on other strategic ventures. ESPN recently struck a deal with Penn Entertainment that will give it $1.5 billion in cash over the next 10 years.

One of the reasons the leagues haven’t confirmed Disney’s offer is because they also need the cash, especially since the regional sports network business is in jeopardy. Teams pay players largely out of sports rights fees. ESPN’s demands play a significant role in how leagues make money. Organizations can make competitive bids for packages of games because ESPN is almost always a potential buyer.

“We have a long-standing relationship with Disney and look forward to continuing discussions around the future of our partnership”, an NBA spokesman said.

According to insiders, Disney has notified the leagues that it is in separate talks with strategic investors that could provide distribution benefits.

An MLB spokesman declined to comment on the situation.

Microsoft isn’t the only tech company continuing with the LayOff Trend. Amazon, Google, and other tech giants have also reduced their headcount this year after rapidly increasing their headcount to meet rising demand during the Covid-19 pandemic. In recent months, Microsoft has justified reaching such decisions due to customers’ desire to save money on their cloud computing bills.

“Organizational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business. We will continue to prioritize and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our customers and partners”, the spokesperson said in an email.

In January, CEO Satya Nadella issued a memo indicating that the company would change its hardware lineup and consolidate leases.

Dealers and customer service representatives used social media to express their disappointment with the company’s decision.

Top Ways to Save Your Career

Expand your horizons
In a rapidly changing industry like technology, adaptability is key to ensuring your relevance. Continuously upgrade your knowledge and skills and keep up with the latest trends, technologies and certifications in your field. By investing in training, you are not only increasing your competency, but also positioning yourself as a valuable asset to your organization. Expand your knowledge and explore adjacent fields in your industry. This will make you more flexible and allow you to navigate and explore new opportunities when needed.

Build a strong professional network
As you know, building and maintaining professional relationships is critical to your long-term career success. Attend relevant events and conferences where you can network with professionals, industry experts and why not potential mentors. These networking opportunities provide valuable connections and insights. Don’t underestimate the role of LinkedIn, which allows you to connect with colleagues, join industry-specific groups and participate in discussions. Active participation in online communities can expand your network and open up new opportunities.

Be confident in your abilities and skills
Demonstrating your value to the organisation is important to secure your position. Align your work with the company’s goals and communicate your progress regularly. Emphasize your accomplishments and the positive impact they have on the organization’s success. Invest in improving your soft skills, such as effective communication, teamwork and leadership abilities. These skills are highly valued in any organization and can set you apart from your colleagues.

This issue results in users encountering an error message titled “AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition Warning” that reads, “A Windows update may have automatically overwritten your AMD graphics driver. Therefore, the version of AMD software you are running is not compatible with the currently installed AMD graphics driver.”

In a support document, AMD confirmed that Windows Update has installed a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) driver for Radeon GPU hardware that is incompatible with the currently installed version of AMD Software.

Here’s how you can prevent Windows Updates from installing drivers for your AMD Radeon graphics system using System Properties:

Press Windows + S keys together to open Search.
Enter Device Installation Settings.
Click Change Device installation settings, and then select the No option (Your device may not work as expected).
Click Save Changes.
Alternatively, users can reinstall the AMD software using the latest package available from AMD.com.

For users who prefer to use UWP drivers for their AMD Graphics – uninstall AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition via Windows Settings | Apps & features and continue to use the OEM’s custom driver software.

New controls such as Pips Pager and TabBar with vertical orientation, as well as the ItemsRepeater feature, offer even more flexibility to create interactive designs. The Uno platform also introduced new features that provide users with greater flexibility in managing the themes and colors of their applications. These features enable the visual appearance of apps to be customized, resulting in a personalized and visual user experience.

The feature to look out for is the import of the Design System Package (DSP), which allows users to create and save custom color palettes for materials that can be easily imported into the Uno Figma plugin to quickly change the theme of the application. This feature streamlines the process of applying consistent colors across different designs and layouts, and provides greater control and flexibility in applying color to application designs.

Uno Platform has added a custom color feature. This feature removes restrictions on the number of colors used in a design and allows designers and developers to create colors that meet their specific requirements.

Preview 5 also offers two important updates to the image preview and display features. The image placeholder has been enhanced to help designers create more accurate visual representations of their designs, and the need to modify images in a randomly generated preview image from the plugin has been removed. That is, images will now appear in the plugin exactly as they appear in the Figma file.

Now that Microsoft has launched its Teams Premium service, it’s changing the free app to work – and not everyone will be happy. On April 12, the company is discontinuing the existing free version of Teams for small businesses in favor of Teams with a similar title, and legacy data won’t be carried over. Businesses that use the service will have to pay at least for the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month) to keep chats, meetings, channels and other key information.

Teams Premium offers AI-generated chapters in PowerPoint Live and “custom timeline markers for when you leave and join a meeting,” Engadget wrote on the topic.

Live captioned translations are also currently available. In the coming months, Teams Premium will be able to automatically generate meeting notes using GPT-3.5. Users will also have access to suggestions for tasks and actions generated by artificial intelligence. Microsoft will likely expand Teams Premium’s AI features over time.

Companies with business accounts will either have to start paying or lose access to past discussions, not to mention the headache of dealing with recreating their channel settings.

That won’t necessarily get customers to switch to alternatives like Slack, especially if they’re heavily invested in Microsoft’s ecosystem. It may, however, cause teams to reevaluate their plans if they can’t justify many paid services.

Earlier, the company introduced the Azure OpenAI service for developers, as well as a tool that helps beginners create their own apps, and a graphic design app that are powered by OpenAI technology. Microsoft is rumored to be embedding ChatGPT, OpenAI’s amazingly popular chatbot, into Bing.

Players expressed sadness in response to the announcement on Twitter. If you’ve invested time in the platform, you should make screen recordings of your favorite games and worlds to preserve those memories and share them with others. It’s sad to see wasted creative effort, and that’s always a risk with world-building games.

https://twitter.com/CraytaGame/status/1620814534385491968?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1620814534385491968%7Ctwgr%5E6945f8c546433059f533b5d431cf34e5d0ebab97%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fd-40085578064095327228.ampproject.net%2F2301181928000%2Fframe.html

“While we’ve expanded Crayta significantly since launch, we’ve unfortunately not seen quite enough growth for us to justify continuing. Google Stadia shut its doors recently, which was the initial launch platform for Crayta, so we’ve decided that now is the right time to bring things to a close, despite the dedicated efforts of our team and our community.”

The team wrote in a Medium post.

The good news is that before it closes Crayta will be organising activities and events, including holiday play streams, as well as help and support to improve creative skills in the future. However, the Unit 2 Games studio will continue to exist.

As the year began, Meta was very unpredictable with his decisions. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg’s company decided to stop one of Oculus’ most popular games, Echo VR, which caused misunderstanding in the gaming community. However, the company continues to acquire other VR and AR-related companies, binance writes on the topic.

The post Meta shuts down metaverse platform Crayta from Unit 2 Games appeared first on Metaverse Post.

The author of the “Out of Office Hours” blog, Michael Niehaus who is a developer and IT admin finds out that the Teams icon is actually saving space on your RAM when it is not placed somewhere on your taskbar.

In his posts he emphasizes on the usage of Windows 11’s widgets – Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge.

Widgets is not the only one which generates several Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes to make it work. WebView2 gives its users an opportunity to use Edge and its rendering engine and it is not necessary to launch Edge or try to use Edge’s user interface.

When united, those processes use a few hundred megabytes of memory in order to work.

All these processes, connected with the widgets, are not able to start unless you actually click the widgets button.

The Microsoft Teams’s processes run no matter if you are using the application or not. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, you can just uninstall it but according to Niehaus removing the icon from the taskbar is enough.

“We are systematically digitalizing our core business to increase the benefits for our customers. Going forward, we aim turn the sale of every digital product into services-based revenue as well.”

To achieve this goal, Bosch is focusing on the connection of IoT with AI – in other words, it is linking the internet of things (IoT) with artificial intelligence (AI). This creates a virtuous circle in which connected products deliver information that, in turn, is processed by means of AI and incorporated into software updates for these products.

At the core of this approach is the benefit for customers, since it allows users to be an integral part of the development process and enables solutions to be tailored precisely to their needs. Furthermore, neither development nor value creation ends with the sale of the products. Rückert added:

“We see the combination of AI and IoT as holding the key to leveraging the most user benefit from both of these technologies. Besides enabling us to develop new business models, this approach helps us offer better products and solutions that deliver real added value for individuals and society as a whole.”

Bosch laid the foundation for this long ago. As of the new year, all electronics product classes will be connectable. Sales of connected power tools, household appliances, and heating systems alone have grown by 50 percent within one year – from four million units in 2020 to more than six million in 2021. With the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI), the company has established a strong unit in the field of AI that has already contributed some 300 million euros to the result.

In addition, the company invests a total of more than four billion euros every year in its software expertise, around three billion of which goes to the mobility business. To shape the software-defined future of mobility, Bosch will also be pooling development activities for application-independent software in one unit as of mid-2022.

In the future, under the umbrella of its subsidiary ETAS GmbH, the company will develop and sell basic vehicle software, middleware, cloud services, and development tools for universal application. Bosch is also rapidly advancing connected and automated driving.

Over the past five years, Bosch has generated some nine billion euros in sales just with driver assistance systems and the associated sensors. Bosch Tech Compass: a survey conducted in five countries around the world

The Bosch Tech Compass – a representative survey conducted in five countries and presented for the first time at CES – shows what people across the globe expect from new technologies. According to the survey, the majority of respondents (72 percent) are convinced that technological progress is making the world a better place, for instance as a key to fighting climate change (76 percent). At the same time, four out of five people think technology should be more focused on tackling the great challenges of our time rather than serving individual needs. Tanja Rückert says:

“We at Bosch also believe that technology offers a broad range of benefits. When we talk about high-tech, we’re not talking only about pushing the envelope on what’s possible. We use technology as a means to improve people’s lives wherever they are.”

One example of the benefit of AI and connectivity is the SoundSee sensor system. Since late 2019, it has been traveling through space to identify unusual sounds on the ISS, using AI algorithms to analyze and indicate when maintenance is required.

Now, in collaboration with the non-profit healthcare company Highmark in Pittsburgh (USA), Bosch is pursuing a completely down-to-earth application of this technology: investigating how audio AI can be used as a diagnostic tool in pediatric medicine. Specifically, Bosch and Highmark are working to adapt the sensors in a way that will enable them to detect pulmonary conditions such as asthma at an early stage just by listening to children’s breathing patterns. Mike Mansuetti, president of Bosch in North America says:

“Using innovative technology to improve children’s health – that’s exactly what we mean with high tech.”

SoundSee’s use in medicine also illustrates Bosch’s understanding of its “Invented for life” strategic imperative.”

Bosch’s new gas sensor – the first on the market to contain AI – serves to protect both humans and nature. Part of Dryad’s Silvanet Wildfire Sensor, it is essentially a digital nose that helps detect forest fires early on. Dryad’s sensors are attached to trees, where they continuously monitor the local microclimate to detect incipient fires – and to wirelessly notify the local authorities, long before camera- or satellite-based systems can. Not only can this protect against devastation by fire, it can also reduce global carbon emissions from forest fires.

A new, lighthearted Bosch campaign shows the solutions the company has developed to improve the little things in people’s everyday lives. Called “High tech #LikeABosch – with many connected, intelligent, and sustainable solutions,” its protagonist takes viewers on a tour through her daily routine and uses several Bosch solutions, from smart glasses to a connected e-bike to a digital access pass for work.