Thanks to a renewed partnership with music creation platform Suno, Microsoft Copilot can now generate short songs with a single text prompt.
The content it creates consists not only of instrumental songs, but also of elaborate lyrics and actual singing voices. Microsoft states in the announcement that you don't need to have pre-existing music making skills. All you need is an idea in your head. If this sounds familiar, that's because both Meta and Google have their versions of this technology in the form of MusicGen and Instrument Playground respectively. These two also function similarly, although they run on a proprietary AI model rather than something from a third party.
How to use the Suno plugin
To use this feature, you will first need to launch Microsoft Edge, as the update is exclusive to the browser, then go to the Copilot website, log in and click on the Plugin tab in the top right corner. Make sure Suno is currently active.
Once everything is in place, enter a text prompt in Copilot and give it enough time to complete. It takes a while for the AI to create something according to the prompt. In our experience, it took Copilot about ten minutes to create the lyrics to a pop song about going on an adventure with your family. Strangely enough, we received no audio.
Copilot told us it had linked to Suno's official website where we could listen to the song, but the URL disappeared as soon as it was done. We then asked the AI to generate another song, but it only wrote the lyrics. When asked where the audio was, Copilot told us to imagine the melody in our heads or sing the words out loud.
This is the first time we've had a music-generating AI that flat-out refuses to produce audio.
Good performance… when it works
From here we headed to Suno's website to get an idea of what the technology can do. The audio sounded really great in our experience. The vocal performances were surprisingly good, although not great. They're not total gibberish like Google's Instrument Playground, but they're not super clear either.
We couldn't find out how good Copilot's music skills are, but if it's anything like Suno's base model, the content it can create will surpass anything MusicGen or Instrument Playground can produce.
The rollout of the Suno plugin has already started and will continue in the coming weeks. We don't know if Microsoft has plans to extend the feature to other browsers, although we have reached out to ask if this is in the works and if Microsoft will address the issues we've encountered. We would have liked to hear the music. This story will be updated at a later date.
In the meantime, check out Ny Breaking's list of the best free music creation software in 2023.