Microsoft on Tuesday announced free and unlimited access to its Voice Mode and the Think Deeper features in Copilot. Both these features are powered by OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model.
The voice mode allows users to interact with Copilot using their voices, whereas the Think Deeper feature helps “tackle complex topics” with comprehensive outputs. The latter is analogous to the deep research features that most AI models are offering of late.
“Our long-held belief has been that when AI is truly democratised, we’ll be able to better empower people to harness its power,” said Yusuf Mehdi, executive VP and CMO at Microsoft.
“We’re excited to continue to meet the demand we’re seeing and enabling people to have extended conversations, take advantage of our advanced reasoning models and iterate with Copilot,” he added.
However, Mehdi also said that while the feature doesn’t have any daily rate limits, the only thing that might slow users down is the server capacity. “We’re actively scaling up to handle the demand,” he added.
Copilot Pro users will continue to have access to the latest models during peak usage, experimental AI features, and the ability to use Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps. As of October last year, Microsoft Copilot had 28 million active users across all platforms.
Meanwhile, the company has reportedly cancelled leases for a significant data centre capacity in the US. This raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of AI infrastructure investments. Microsoft may be reassessing its AI computing needs, even as it pledges to spend $80 billion this fiscal year on compute infrastructure.
