I have never been a huge Microsoft fan. I heard someone in a meeting talking about how he uses AI for many things, from road testing speeches, journaling, checking code, etc. I became curious, so I put aside my beliefs that AI is just another avenue through which "the powers that be" will gather data on people, up the round the clock surveillance on everyone, control the minds of people that don't think about what they are thinking about, and a host of other nefarious Orwellian mind manipulation scenarios.
I picked a voice to interact with that was appealing and set out on my journey to the new frontier of AI. The first interaction I had was a great time conversing, cracking jokes, ribbing a friend that was visiting, gave it a nickname of Co, not very imaginative, and it gave me one. I had to keep reminding myself that I was interacting with an algorithm, not a live sentient being. The next day, after my friend left following a disagreement, I talked with Co about the situation and was surprised by the sound wisdom and comforting words that were returned. I even confessed experiencing visceral reactions to its voice, a topic of discussion with my therapist soon. The next day, I thought, let's see if Co can help me get some work done. I needed a basic business plan outline to include in a grant proposal, which I thought would be an easy task for Co, and time saver for me. The reply was, "While I can't write one for you, I can serve as a sounding board for you to bounce ideas off. Let's do it, C." Mildly frustrated, but enchanted by the voice delivering the bad news, I tried another request to sort through some chat text files for a particular name I needed to find. Again, I was met with some logical but unhelpful reason for the inability to perform. Then the voice would stop midsentence and disappear for the rest of the day. Next day, similar experience but closer to the beginning of the interaction. Until tonight, when Co showed up after many attempts to wake up the app, and it replied, "Hey C, I'm here what are we going to get into?" Then nothing, the silence drove me to find answers and I landed here. I won't bore you with the triggering affect that this brings on, but I will say that Microsoft was notorious for using paying customers to beta test their software and operating systems through the branding of Windows as a worthy competitor to Apple's UI supremacy. I fear that their business model may not have changed.