Intuit is winding down budgeting app Mint this week and that’s become good news for competitor Copilot.
The New York-based CEO started the subscription-based personal finance tracker in January 2020 to offer an alternative to Mint.
Users also save an average of 5% after starting with the app, Copilot calculates.
Beyond MintLike millions of others, Ugarte tried some personal finance apps, including Mint, yet found them to be lacking.
Other personal finance apps show where you are spending, even in categories that might not be relevant, he said.
But that’s how things are at Microsoft now: everything needs to have a Copilot angle — even its most straightforward hardware events.
“Windows 11 and Windows 365 promise a new era of AI productivity,” Melissa Grant, Microsoft’s senior director for Windows Enterprise said.
Microsoft is also betting on cloud PCs delivered through Windows 365 as a surface for the Copilot.
Microsoft says that Windows App usage has now reached over 3 million active hours since it entered preview at the Microsoft Ignite 2023 in November.
And those Windows 365 cloud PCs?
What’s been billed as a Windows event is, predictably, focused on AI efforts, with Copilot taking the wheel.
The new Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business both sport a devoted Copilot key wedged between the Alt key and arrows.
At the end of the day, a Copilot key is simply a physical shortcut that surfaces one particular service.
That the key has been added to a pair of business-focused devices highlights how much the company is considering Copilot an important enterprise play.
The Surface Pro 10 for Business sports a 13-inch touchscreen, powered by either the Intel Core Ultra 5 or 7 and the Intel AI Boost NPU.
But the company has also released a new API called FinanceKit that lets developers fetch transactions and balance information from Apple Card, Apple Cash, and Savings with Apple.
The most requested credit card integration is now live on Copilot Money 💳 Starting today, Copilot can keep track of your Apple Card, Apple Cash, and Savings accounts.
It released the Apple Card in 2019.
Earlier this year, it said that Apple Card users earned $1 billion in daily cash rewards in 2023.
In April 2023, Apple launched a savings account with a 4.15% APY in partnership with Goldman Sachs.
You may not have a Copilot key on your PC’s keyboard yet, but if you’re a Windows 11 user, you’ll soon be able to use Copilot for a lot more everyday tasks on your desktop.
Starting today, Microsoft is adding skills that will allow the Copilot to change more Windows 11 settings for you and plugins for services like OpenTable, Shopify and Kayak.
Restaurant reservations through OpenTable, travel reservations through Kayak and a Shopify integration are surely only the start here, too.
At the same time, Microsoft is now also integrating more AI features into its existing Windows apps.
The second is a feature that automatically removes silence from videos in the Clipchamps video editor.
GitHub today announced the general availability of Copilot Enterprise, the $39/month version of its code completion tool and developer-centric chatbot for large businesses.
Many teams already keep their documentation in GitHub repositories today, making it relatively easy for Copilot to reason over it.
On top of talking about today’s release, I also asked Dohmke about his high-level thinking of where Copilot is going next.
“Different use cases require different models.
We will continue going down that path of using the best models for the different pieces of the Copilot experience,” Dohmke said.
Alinea Invest, a fintech app offering AI-powered wealth management aimed at Gen Z women, has $3.4 million in seed funding ahead of the launch of a virtual AI assistant that will help users with their investing needs.
“The pain point we saw is that people like us who are young women, Gen Zs, children of immigrants, they have no idea where to start.
With the seed round of $3.4 million, Alinea wants to move further into the AI market with the launch of an AI financial advisor.
Though competition is rife in the fintech space, Alinea believes they can capture a particular demographic — the younger, Gen Z investor, and largely women.
“Financial literacy and investing is a crucial path to wealth and financial stability for women and Gen Z,” said Kelly Graziadei, F7 General Partner.
Now it’s building out its suite of AI products with the launch of its AI assistant CoPilot.
PatSnap CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Tiong tells TechCrunch that PatSnap exists to remove friction in the innovation process for its customers, both within IP and R&D teams, and between them.
IP teams can use PatSnap’s AI tools to analyze their markets and protect inventions at scale, says Tiong.
What CoPilot does is build further onto PatSnap’s AI products.
It enables IP and R&D teams to find what they need more quickly within patents, non-patent literature and technical news.
Given it’s a free alternative, it’s somewhat surprising that Copilot’s launch hasn’t seemingly impacted ChatGPT’s installs or revenue as of yet — but that could be explained by the lack of promotion.
Unlike some apps, Copilot’s installs are also somewhat evenly split across iOS and Android, with 59% on Google Play vs. 41% on the App Store.
According to Appfigures, ChatGPT’s downloads have also been slowing in December — but this started before Copilot’s release.
During the time that Copilot was amassing its 2.1 million installs, ChatGPT gained another 4.2 million downloads.
The firm told TechCrunch there’s nothing to indicate that Copilot itself is having any impact on ChatGPT’s installs or its revenue, the latter of which continues to rise, in fact.
Microsoft would like 2024 to be the “year of the AI PC” and to put a point on that, the company today announced a new key for Copilot — that is, a physical key that will soon make its way to your keyboard and join the Windows key, together with its friends the Control key, Alt and that Insert key you’ve never purposely used.
Based on the image Microsoft sent over, it looks like the new Copilot key will replace the right Control key on the standard PC keyboard, where it will slot in between the Alt key and the left arrow key.
“The introduction of the Copilot key marks the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, Executive Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, writes in today’s announcement.
The Copilot key joins the Windows key as a core part of the PC keyboard and when pressed, the new key will invoke the Copilot in Windows experience to make it seamless to engage Copilot in your day to day.”In regions where Copilot is not available, the Copilot key will launch Windows Search.
The first keyboards with the new key will launch at this year’s CES in Las Vegas and will likely start shipping in late February.
