Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot can now act as your personal song writer by creating songs based on your requests. In a blog post published Wednesday, Microsoft revealed Copilot’s new skills as a composer courtesy of a third-party plug-in called Suno, an AI-based music generator.
Also: Windows 12 FAQ: Yes, it’s coming in 2024 (and more surprising predictions)
With the plug-in enabled, you describe the subject of the song and the style or genre at the prompt. In response, Copilot writes and displays the lyrics and offers a Play button for you to hear its musical masterpiece. As a few examples, ask it to compose a country music song about two turtles who fall in love or a jazz song about a man getting a haircut or a rap song about a robot learning to be human.
The lyrics appear fairly quickly, but you may need to wait a while for the song itself to generate depending on the lyrics and style. After the music is ready, you can play it and share it via email or social media.
How to try it
To give it a shot, open Microsoft Edge and browse to the Copilot website. Click the heading for Plugins at the right and turn on the one for Suno if it’s not already on. Alternatively, click the Suno logo that says: “Make music with Suno.” Type your request at the prompt, and the response is slowly generated. When the image for your music appears, click the Play button to give it a listen.
I tried a few prompts asking Copilot to compose tunes in different styles and on different subjects. Though the results wouldn’t win any Grammys, they did show a certain flair and were especially adept at capturing the style of music I specified.
Also: ZDNET looks back on tech in 2023, and looks ahead to 2024
With the progress being made in generative AI, more tools have been popping up that can create images, videos, and music based on your text descriptions. Using the Suno plug-in, Microsoft Copilot joins other current and upcoming AI-enabled music creation tools, including Google’s MusicLM, Meta’s AudioCraft, and Stability AI’s Stable Audio.
“You don’t have to know how to sing, play an instrument, or read music to bring your musical ideas to life,” Microsoft said in its blog post. “Microsoft Copilot and Suno will do all the hard work for you, matching the song to cues in your prompt. We believe that this partnership will open new horizons for creativity and fun, making music creation accessible to everyone.”
