Microsoft showed how artificial intelligence could be found in many software applications by writing code on the fly.

Kevin Scott, the company's chief technology officer, demonstrated an artificial intelligence assist for the game at the Microsoft Build developer conference. The character in the game is powered by the same machine learning technology that Microsoft has been testing. The feat shows how recent advances in artificial intelligence could change personal computing in the future by replacing interface that you tap, type, and click to navigate with interface that you simply have a conversation with.

The agent converts typed commands into code behind the scenes using the software app for the game. The model that controls the bot was trained on a lot of code and natural language text, and then shown the specifications for the game. When a player tells it to come here, the underlying model will generate the code needed to have the agent move toward the player. The bot in the demo was able to perform more complex tasks, like retrieving items and combining them to make something new. The model can respond to simple questions about how to build things because it was trained on natural language and code.

Similar tricks could be used to make other applications respond to typed or spoken commands.

Copilot is a coding tool built by Microsoft. It suggests code when a developer starts typing or when comments are added to a piece of code. Scott says that Copilot is the first instance of what will likely be a lot of other products from Microsoft and other companies. He says that code-writing artificial intelligence lets you think about doing software development in a different way.

Scott doesn't give specific examples, but one day it could mean a version of Windows that locates a document and emails it to a colleague when you ask, or a version of excel that turns a dataset into a chart when you ask.

In the last few years, artificial intelligence has excelled at a number of tasks. New artificial intelligence programs are capable of more sophisticated feats, such as generating coherent text and computer code.

The codex artificial intelligence model that was used to build the bot was developed by Openai, a company that received funding from Microsoft. Billions of lines of code from the popular repository for software owned by Microsoft were trained on Codex.

Microsoft says that over 10,000 developers are using Copilot to produce 35 percent of their code in popular languages like Java and Python. Anyone will be able to download Copilot this summer. Codex is the underlying model of the artificial intelligence that would be used to build theMinecraft bot.

Codex and Copilot have caused some developers to worry that they could be automated out of a job. Concerns could be inspired by the demo. Scott says that the feedback on Copilot has been mostly positive, suggesting that it can be used to automate more tedious coding tasks.