AI race continues with Microsoft Loop, Canva and more

This week more tech companies launched newer updates powered by artificial intelligence (AI). While Microsoft is continuing to integrate more of its products with AI, Canva, GitHub and Opera have joined in with shiny updates. Here is all you need to know about the rapidly growing AI space. 

Microsoft Loop: Microsoft has rolled out a competitor for Notion with its new Loop app. In a blog post, Microsoft described Loop as “a transformative co-creation experience that brings together teams, content, and tasks across your tools and devices." There are three main elements of Loop: components, workspaces and pages, according to a blog post on the Microsoft website. 

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Similar to Notion, Microsoft Loop is aimed at helping you organize everything you need for a project into a workspace. It also allows you to break down information, sharing only the relevant parts with specific people. Other features include progress trackers and custom labels. The Loop preview will support up to 50 people editing a workspace simultaneously. 

Canva Create: Web-based design platform Canva has introduced new AI-powered design tools focused on making the content creation process easier, faster, and more creative. For instance, Magic Design is aimed at turning any inspiration into a design, as announced at Canva's Create event. Users have to just upload a picture and select a design. Curated templates will then be generated for use. With Translate, users can design in over 100 languages.

People will also be able to turn their words into designs using the Text to Image tool. For instance, if they type, “A light pink watercolour painting of koi fish in a pond," the image will be auto-generated. A new Brand Hub will also be added to Canva’s Visual Worksuite for users to access tools meant to create consistent content and update brand assets in one place. 

GitHub Copilot X: Developed in partnership with OpenAI, GitHub Copilot X uses the latest model GPT-4. Earlier, GitHub had partnered with OpenAI to create GitHub Copilot, the “world’s first at-scale generative AI development tool made with OpenAI’s Codex model, a descendent of GPT-3," according to a blog post on its site. Currently, GitHub Copilot is writing 46% of code and helps developers code up to 55% faster.

With OpenAI announcing GPT-4 last week, GitHub Copilot followed suit with an upgrade to Copilot X, which will use the GPT-4 model and introduce chat and voice. The new chat interface is focused on developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio, according to the post. 

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Copilot X recognizes the code a developer has typed, and the error messages, and is deeply embedded into the integrated development environment. With this update, a developer can get in-depth analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests and get proposed fixes to bugs, the post explained. 

Opera: Opera is integrating AI capabilities into its desktop browsers, Opera and Opera GX. On 22 March, in a press statement, Opera announced AI Prompts and sidebar integration of GPT-based services ChatGPT and ChatSonic. With these updates, users will be able to explore AI-generated content (AIGC) tools within Opera and Opera GX. 

Announcing the integration, Joanna Czajka, product director at Opera, called AIGC a “game-changer for web browsing" and explained that the goal is to use the technologies to reimage how users learn, create, and research. 

Users will be able quickly to start conversations with generative AI services to shorten or explain articles, generate tweets, or request relevant content based on the highlighted text, according to the statement. 

This integration marks the first stage of Opera’s Browser AI. The next stage will be built on Opera’s own GPT-based browser AI engine. “Opera is actively expanding its AI program into AIGC for browser, news, and gaming products through its solutions and new and existing partnerships," Czajka explained in the statement. 

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