Microsoft is unveiling big changes to its Office 365 product, the company said Monday, starting with a name change: Office 365 is now Microsoft 365, a change meant to signify to customers that more of Microsoft is coming in the subscription service, such as tech support and the power of A.I. The company is using A.I. to create new tools, add new rich content types, and include new cloud-powered experiences.
Separately, the company announced a new product: Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, which brings the same tools that keep your work life humming to your family. The new services launch today, March 30, and offer chat tools, a way to share photos, and lists, calendars, safety tools, and more – but it’s not about doing more so much as getting the right things done, explained Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of Modern Life, Search, and Devices at Microsoft.
“We see a redefinition of what we think of as personal productivity,” Mehdi told Digital Trends ahead of the launch. “It’s not about how many checklists I can get done in a day, it’s can I get done the one thing I need to get done?”
To that end, the company is unveiling a Family Safety feature for Microsoft 365 that’s meant to help manage children’s screen time, prevent distracted driving, screen for inappropriate content, and more.
“We’re trying to bridge the divide between digital safety and family safety,” Mehdi said. The service includes new tools to filter content so teens and younger children can’t access the entire web, a new end-of-week report with details on browsing time and time spent in apps, and more. It also can be used to monitor physical location, letting a parent set an alert if a child leaves school, for example, or a senior wanders away from a managed care facility. The same app can monitor where someone drives, and will report how often they checked their phone or texted while driving.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft 365 suite is being enhanced with a new A.I.-powered Editor, guidance on inclusiveness, suggestions for how to rewrite whole sentences, a right-panel pane for Word (and ultimately Outlook, your web browser, and more) with spelling and grammar suggestions, and more.
It’s available in over 20 languages, and will be free, although a paid version offers substantially more features.
PowerPoint is being upgraded with new premium templates, including the ability to add video backgrounds to your presentations. More meaningful is a new Presenter Coach that uses artificial intelligence to analyze your performance, suggest when you should look at the audience more, note if you use too many “ums,” and more.
It’ll even rate you on your originality, pacing, and more.
Finally, Excel is gaining a powerful new Money template that lets you ingest account information from a bank or retirement savings account and display live data feeds. It leans on WolframAlpha for this integration, as well as for new data types, such as colleges, which will let you build a spreadsheet to help evaluate which school your child should attend, and food, to help keep tabs on a healthy diet.
These new features will start rolling out today, Microsoft says, and will reach the over 38 million Office 365 subscribers over the next few months. They won’t all be free.
While anyone can access the essential features of the new Editor tool, for example, such as spelling and basic grammar across Word, Outlook.com, and the web, Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers will have access to advanced tools such as a plagiarism check and a feature that will suggest rewrites.
The Presenter Coach will start out free, but will transition to a feature only for subscribers. And Money will be free to Office Insiders this spring, but only subscribers will be able to access over 100 new data types in the coming months, thanks to the partnership with Wolfram Alpha.
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.