Posted On 26 Jun 2021

Many people have ideas for apps and perhaps feel that they could exploit them commercially if only they could code themselves or afford to pay someone else to do it for them. Now there is an alternative announced by Microsoft at their Microsoft Build conference for developers.

Microsoft had already introduced the PowerApps application which was designed to help users to write programs that could perform tasks in Windows using templates to interpret data and output results as instructed by users. This was essentially one step up from the macros available in Microsoft Office. However, even though this was supposed to be easy, many users found it a slow and complicated process.

In order to make using PowerApps more simple, Microsoft are integrating it with the GPT- 3AI model so that users will be able to speak to the app and give it instructions in plain language which it can then turn into code, for example, “Select all products with ‘football’ in the name.” Using this style of input will allow users with no coding experience at all to create apps; where before a user would have had to create a query such as Sort(Search(‘orders’, “football”, “product_name”), ‘purchase_date’, Ascending), 10) they can now simply say, “Find 10 orders with football in the product name and list them in order of purchase date with the oldest order first.” PowerApps will then create the expression in code. How the results are interpreted will still be up to the user.

It’s thought that the GPT- 3AI upgrade will ultimately be used in many other Microsoft products. The Office 365 suite already uses a certain amount of AI; one example is Excel where it’s possible to run a search telling the program what sort of spreadsheet one wants to create. At present you would still need a certain amount of expertise with spreadsheets in order to follow the instructions; if Microsoft continues to introduce more advanced AI, you may soon be able to create expert-level outputs using nothing but plain language instructions.