Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot, Copilot, has teamed up with Suno, a generative AI music app, allowing Copilot users to compose songs with a simple text prompt.
Users can now input prompts like “Create a pop song about adventures with your family,” and Suno, through a plug-in, transforms these ideas into complete songs. The generated songs include lyrics, instrumentals, and even singing voices, Microsoft said in a blog post on Tuesday (December 19).
To access the Suno integration, Copilot users can visit Copilot.Microsoft.com, log in with their Microsoft account, and enable the Suno plug-in. Alternatively, they can click on the Suno logo labeled “Make music with Suno.”
Users can their share the AI-generated tracks to their social media pages.
“Through this partnership, people will have at their fingertips the ability, regardless of musical background, to create fun, clever, and personalized songs with a simple prompt,” Microsoft said.
“Through this partnership, people will have at their fingertips the ability, regardless of musical background, to create fun, clever, and personalized songs with a simple prompt.”
Microsoft
“We believe that this partnership will open new horizons for creativity and fun, making music creation accessible to everyone.”
Suno doesn’t allow free users to monetize Suno-created music on platforms like YouTube or Spotify, and retains the rights to any songs created by free users. But it grants commercial rights to paid subscribers, The Verge reports.
Microsoft oversees an extensive research initiative dedicated to AI Music known as Muzic. This project, initiated in 2019, falls under the purview of ‘The Deep and Reinforcement Learning Group’ at Microsoft Research Asia (MSR Asia) in China, a research lab with locations in Beijing and Shanghai.
Described as a “world-class research lab,” MSR Asia, established in 1998, focuses on fundamental and applied research aligning with Microsoft’s long-term strategy and future computing vision.
The primary objective of Muzic is to explore AI-powered advancements in various facets of music, encompassing text to music generation, lyric generation, lyric-to-melody generation, and songwriting. Microsoft characterizes Muzic as a “project on AI music that empowers music understanding and generation with deep learning and artificial intelligence.”
Among the notable achievements of Muzic includes the development of an AI-powered “rap generator” called DeepRapper. The team has also ventured into singing voice synthesis, employing AI to mimic human voices. Another notable creation is MuseCoCo, short for ‘Music Composition Copilot,’ an AI-powered text-to-symbolic music generator. MuseCoCo generates “symbolic music” (such as MIDI format, excluding audio) based on text prompts.
The collaboration between Copilot and Suno reflects the growing trend among tech giants and startups to invest in GenAI-driven music creation technology. Notably, Google‘s DeepMind and YouTube introduced Lyria, a GenAI model for music, and Dream Track, a limited-access tool for AI tunes.
Meta has also showcased experiments with AI music generation, launching its own text-to-music AI generator called MusicGen, which the Facebook parent says was trained on 20,000 hours of licensed music.
Despite the enthusiasm for AI-synthesized music, ethical and legal challenges persist. Some artists express discomfort with AI algorithms learning from existing music, especially when consent and compensation are lacking.
Suno, unlike some GenAI music tools, does not disclose its AI training data sources on its website. While it claims to block certain prompts, it does not restrict users from entering requests like “in the style of [artist],” says TechCrunch.
However, Suno claims that it attempts to block certain prompts and that its models do not recognize artists’ names. The platform also claims to block users from uploading the lyrics to existing songs to generate covers.
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