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Microsoft Lens is getting replaced by AI
PLUS: Recent Developments In AI
The AI Surface
August 11, 2025
👩💻 Greetings To All AI Learners. Microsoft is nudging users toward the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, which now includes scanning features and aims to centralize multiple tools into one AI-driven app.
✨ In today’s AI News we will cover:
💁🏽♀️ Microsoft Lens is getting replaced by AI.
💁🏽♀️ NASA and Google are building an AI medical assistant.
💁🏽♀️ Pinterest CEO’s views on agentic shopping.
💁🏽♀️ Meta acquires WaveForms.
💁🏽♀️ 4 Trending AI Tools
LATEST NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
✨ MICROSOFT’S REPLACEMENT
🕶 Microsoft is retiring the beloved Microsoft Lens scanning app by December 15, 2025, replacing it with AI-powered tools in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app leaving fans nostalgic for its simplicity and ease of use.
💫 Highlights
⚡️Replacement: Microsoft 365 Copilot app gains scanning features.
⚡️Feature Gap: Copilot currently lacks some Lens-specific functions like direct OneNote/Word/PowerPoint saves, business card scanning, and accessibility tools.
⚡️User Reaction: Strong pushback from loyal Lens users, citing preference for its lightweight, no-frills design.
💫 Significance
💦 AI Consolidation Trend: This move reflects Microsoft’s broader push to merge single-purpose utilities into AI-driven, multi-function apps.
💦 User Experience Shift: While promising more integration, Copilot risks alienating users who prefer streamlined tools over feature-heavy AI apps.
💦 App Ecosystem Impact: Lens’s retirement could open space for third-party scanner apps to attract former users.
✨ NASA AND GOOGLE’S LATEST INNOVATION
🏆 NASA and Google have developed the Crew Medical Officer Digital Assistant (CMO-DA), an AI-powered clinical decision support system designed to help astronauts autonomously diagnose and treat medical issues during deep-space missions especially when communication with Earth is delayed or unavailable.
💫 Highlights
💣 What It Is: CMO-DA is a multimodal tool that accepts speech, text, and image inputs to assist with medical diagnosis and treatment recommendations. It's built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform.
💣 Proof-of-Concept Testing: Evaluated using the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) framework, the assistant demonstrated accuracy of 74% for flank pain, 80% for ear pain, and 88% for ankle injuries.
💣 Why It Matters: Designed for Earth-independent healthcare, CMO-DA fills the gap when real-time help is impossible either due to communication delays of up to ~20 minutes or communications blackouts in deep space.
💫 Significance
➡️ Enabling Deep-Space Autonomy: CMO-DA helps close the medical support gap in missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond by empowering crews to manage health independently vital as traditional Earth-based care becomes less feasible.
➡️ Public-Private Innovation: This NASA-Google collaboration exemplifies how public-private partnerships can accelerate AI-driven advances in space medicine blending domain expertise with cutting-edge tech.
➡️ Dual-Use Impact: While born for space, CMO-DA’s architecture could revolutionize rural or underserved healthcare delivery here on Earth, supporting early diagnoses where medical professionals are scarce.
✨ PINTEREST’S NEW THOUGHTS
📢 Pinterest’s CEO, Bill Ready, says that truly autonomous, agentic shopping where AI buys on your behalf is still likely years away. For now, Pinterest is focused on enhancing the shopping journey with AI-powered assistance, not full automation.
💫 Highlights
🕺🏽 Agentic Shopping Still Far Off: Ready emphasized that users aren’t yet ready to let AI shop for them entirely "a very, very long cycle" remains before agentic shopping becomes mainstream.
🕺🏽 Current Focus: AI Shopping Assistant Instead, Pinterest positions itself as an “AI-enabled shopping assistant,” offering proactive, personalized recommendations aligned with each user’s tastes and style.
🕺🏽 AI Everywhere Strategy: The company is investing heavily in recommendation systems, personalization, multimodal models (combining text and images), visual search, and AI-powered advertising efficiencies all under the broader “Cambrian moment” of AI evolution.
💫 Significance
💃🏽 Realism Over Hype: Ready’s cautious stance about agentic shopping contrasts with more optimistic AI narratives elsewhere his realism may shield Pinterest from overpromising and help build long-term trust.
💃🏽 Bridging Inspiration and Purchase: By focusing on an AI assistant rather than autonomous purchasing, Pinterest reinforces its core strength as an inspiration-first platform, gradually easing users toward action.
💃🏽 Innovation with Restraint: This balanced strategy incremental AI improvements without sacrificing user control positions Pinterest as a thoughtful innovator in the evolving social commerce landscape.
✨ META’S RECENT ACQUISITION
📒 Meta has acquired WaveForms AI, a startup that specializes in understanding and replicating emotion in speech, and integrated its founders into its Superintelligence Labs to bolster emotionally expressive AI voice capabilities.
💫 Highlights
✒️ Acquisition Details: Meta acquired WaveForms AI for an undisclosed sum. WaveForms had raised $40 million in seed funding at a pre-money valuation of around $160 million.
✒️ Founders Joining Meta: Co-founders Alexis Conneau (ex-Meta/OpenAI audio expert) and Coralie Lemaitre (former Google strategist) have joined Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs.
✒️ Tech Focus: WaveForms aimed to solve the "Speech Turing Test" making AI speech indistinguishable from human voice and developed "Emotional General Intelligence" to detect nuance and emotion in audio.
💫 Significance
🌀 Elevating Voice AI with Emotion: The deal underscores Meta’s commitment to making AI interactions feel more human, by infusing voice technology with emotional depth and expressiveness.
🌀 Talent-Driven Growth: Bringing in founders with deep expertise in emotion-rich audio AI boosts Meta’s credibility and capability in building advanced conversational systems.
🌀 Strategic Consolidation: By acquiring both WaveForms and PlayAI, Meta positions itself at the forefront of emotion-aware voice AI, potentially shaping how users communicate across Facebook, Meta’s VR platforms, and beyond.
QUICK HITS
✨ 4 TRENDING AI TOOLS
🤖 OpusClip
🔊 Function: Generates AI videos, avatars, or repurpose videos with editing and scripting automation.
🤖 Lovo.ai
🔊 Function: Used for voice generation.
🤖 Looka
🔊 Function: Creates stunning visuals, branding assets, and presentation slides.
🔊 Function: Used to create visuals from text prompts with realism, ethical training, or creative flair.
✨ Other Recent Developments In AI
☛ Upstage’s Solar Pro 2 has catapulted South Korea into the ranks of global AI frontier leaders.
☛ OpenAI has unveiled GPT-5, its most advanced AI model yet, available to all ChatGPT users (free and paid).
☛ AI-enabled digital avatars often called “deathbots” or “griefbots” are increasingly being used to recreate deceased loved ones for conversational interaction.
🤓 That’s A Wrap For Today!
Stay tuned for more updates.
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— The AI Surface