Microsoft Is Trying to Trick You Into Using Copilot

There is a tonne AI products there to choose today, but it is quite clear who are the big players. There are Google Gemini, with its 400 million monthly users, which is very similar, until week. This is really not up to Microsoft, whose AI assistant co -pilot collects 20 million weekly users. It’s a lot of people, be careful, but if you are Microsoft, you may think of ways to draw part of this Openai and Google traffic – even if Microsoft is a major partner of Openai.

It seems to be exactly what Microsoft does. If you use Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, you will find many different options to interact with Copilot. You can click on the Big Copilot button next to the search bar, or manage the huge “co -pilot response” that appears at the top of any given search result, to the AI overview. But if you try to use Bing to search for another AI product, like Chatgpt or Gemini, this co-pilot response is replaced by something else: Copilot itself.

Bing Co -Pilot Lacherie

Try it. As long as Microsoft has not updated Bing since I published this play, a search for one of these IA competitors will lead to the following: you will see “promoted by Microsoft: your co -pilot is here”, encouraging you to “ask questions, generate images and manage tasks with co -pilot, your reliable companion”. Below, a large interactive search bar, which reads: “Ask me anything.” Indeed, you can enter a request in this area, its return, and find yourself in a new co -pilot window. (Curiously, research or anthropic or its AI product, Claude, does not trigger this copilotic experience. Sorry, anthropic.)

Look, Bing is a Microsoft product, so of course, the company prefers to head to its own services than to tell you the thing you are really looking for. In fact, the same thing happens when you are looking for a bing for a non -Microsoft web browser, like Chrome – Chrome’s first “result” is rather a plea to “try the latest Microsoft browser”, with a practical link to launch Edge. For me, however, this last tactic blurs the lines between encouragement and cunning. I think that if you are looking for a web browser and Microsoft offers you a link to another, it is quite obvious that you choose between these two programs. However, I can see how it could be confusing for someone looking for a chatgpt on bing to see a search bar appear immediately, with an encouraging message to start at that time, especially if he does not know what Copilot is.

It becomes a trend, Microsoft

It would not be the first time that Microsoft has tried to encourage people to use their products. At the beginning of this year, the company usurped the Google home page whenever someone used Bing to search for Google. With an unusted eye, you might think that you have already landed on Google, because the upper half of the window looked a lot like the emblematic search engine. It was only after looking at the lower half that it became clear that it was always a research result on the Bing site, not that of Google. How many people were led to use Bing when they thought they were using the search engine they were looking for?

Quick advance until August, and I now wonder how many people will use Copilot because they thought they had arrived at Chatgpt or Gemini. In my humble opinion, if you want to build a search engine, this should mainly indicate people to the content they are looking for. The use of your search engine as a vehicle to encourage people to use your other services is dishonest and, frankly, sad.