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.
Instead, it’s settling into a place where its use is already commonplace, even for purposes for which it’s frankly ill-suited.
The doomerism vs. e/acc debate continues apace, with all the grounded, fact-based arguments on either side that you can expect from the famously down-to-earth Silicon Valley elites.
Witness everything always, forever, but if you’re looking for specifics, self-driving is a very handy recent one, as is VR and the metaverse.
Utopian vs. dystopian debates in tech always do what they’re actually intended to do, which is distract from having real conversations about the real, current-day impact of technology as it’s actually deployed and used.
Use of generative AI, according to most recent studies, is fairly prevalent and growing, especially among younger users.
Confluent, HashiCorp and MongoDB, for example, will provide data to train Duet AI for Developers to help developers with writing code for their platforms.
Google’s overall story around its AI coding tools is essentially the same as from every other vendor.
For now, the company only said that Turing, an ‘AI-powered tech services company,” saw a 33% productivity gain after adopting Duet AI for Developers.
Duet AI for Developers currently supports over 20 languages, including C, C++, Java, JavaScript and Python.
Until the end of January 2024, Duet AI for Developers will be available for free.
