Microsoft is testing a feature for Copilot AI that will remember your past chats – and it could anger privacy campaigners
Microsoft is trying out another feature for Copilot that could be controversial, allowing users to enable personalization for the AI and tailor responses to previous chats.
Windows Latest discovered the feature in Copilot – which, despite being officially renamed that way, is still called Bing Chat in some menus – and played around with it.
When the personalization option (in Settings) is enabled, the AI uses insights from your chat history to “make conversations unique to you,” according to the feature description. Elsewhere, Microsoft mentions that recent conversations are referenced, although it doesn’t make clear how far back that goes.
Windows Latest gives us an example scenario where you talked about learning French with Copilot, and then you start a new topic about learning software. Copilot can then suggest apps that will help you in your quest to learn to speak French.
This feature is only available to some Copilot users and it appears Microsoft is still testing the concept. According to online feedback, some users have seen their Copilot AI’s functionality come and go.
Windows Latest highlights a further addition to the mix for Copilot, namely a ‘Search Bing’ option that appears when you mouse over a message in chat. If your query is not satisfactorily handled by the AI, you can simply start a web search as a follow-up.
Analysis: double-edged sword?
Personalization is considered a double-edged sword. On the one hand, additional context will be helpful in helping the AI come up with material more relevant to your needs. On the other hand, it raises questions about how far back into chat history Microsoft is combing, and issues related to that data: is there any personal profile being built here beyond the limited nature presented (i.e. only recent chats)?
We assume not, but this is an idea that has been suggested in online forums (such as Reddit) until now, and people will always be paranoid when it comes to the privacy of these types of features. And that’s actually not surprising, given the amount of data that big tech companies collect and profile on a broader level.
Notably, Microsoft has felt the wrath of EU regulations lately, significantly disrupting the software giant’s plans for Copilot, meaning the AI has not yet been deployed to European users while the legal wrinkles have been ironed out. That includes not just the work on Copilot, but other changes to Microsoft’s products elsewhere (some of them relatively radical, like removing Bing’s hooks from the search box in Windows 11’s taskbar).
Speaking of Bing, the new integrated search option for Copilot is a useful extra, although we don’t expect to see an option to change the search engine used (obviously). It should be noted that Bard has a similar built-in ‘Google It’ capability, which has been in that AI since launch, so Microsoft is playing catch-up here.