Human-Centered AI (www.microsoft.com)

Microsoft unveiled the Copilot Fall Release: a major push to make AI “human-centered” with 12 new features that emphasize collaboration, personalization, and deeper integration across Edge, Windows and cloud apps. Highlights include Groups—shared Copilot sessions for up to 32 people—and Imagine, a collaborative space for browsing and remixing AI-generated creative work. Copilot gains long-term memory and shared context (editable by users), connectors to OneDrive, Outlook, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar with explicit-consent access, and Proactive Actions (preview) that surface timely insights from recent activity. The release also adds a customizable visual companion, Mico, conversation styles that can push back constructively, and Pages support for multi-file uploads (up to 20 files). Availability begins in the U.S. and rolls out to other regions. For AI/ML practitioners the release signals several technical trends: wider multimodal deployments (MAI-Voice-1, MAI-1-Preview, MAI-Vision-1), integrated retrieval and grounding pipelines (Copilot Search with cited sources, health responses grounded in Harvard Health), memory and personalization at scale, and research into social intelligence metrics for group interactions. Edge/Windows integrations enable reasoning over open tabs, voice-only navigation, Journeys for session provenance, and Copilot Vision for real-time task guidance. Together these changes push assistants from reactive Q&A toward proactive, context-rich companions—raising practical opportunities around retrieval-augmented systems, privacy/consent architectures, and evaluation frameworks for collaborative and long-term personalization.