Thanks to a newfound partnership with music creation platform Suno, Microsoft Copilot can now generate short-form songs with a single text prompt.
The content it creates not only consists of instrumentals but also fleshed-out lyrics and actual singing voices. Microsoft states in the announcement that you don’t need to have any pre-existing music-making skills. All you need is an idea in your head. If any of this sounds familiar to you, that’s because both Meta and Google have their versions of this technology in the form of MusicGen and Instrument Playground, respectively. These two function similarly too, although they run on a proprietary AI model instead of something third-party.
How to use the Suno plugin
To use this feature, you’ll have to first launch Microsoft Edge, as the update is exclusive to the browser, then head on over to the Copilot website, sign in, and click the Plugin tab in the top right corner. Make sure that Suno is currently active.
Once everything is in place, enter a text prompt into Copilot and give it enough time to finish. It does take a little while for the AI to create something according to the prompt. In our experience, it took Copilot about ten minutes to make lyrics to a pop song about having an adventure with your family. Strangely, we didn’t receive any audio.
Copilot told us it made a link to Suno’s official website where we could listen to the track, but the URL disappeared the moment it was finished. We then prompted the AI to generate another song, however it only wrote the lyrics. When asked where the audio was, Copilot told us to imagine the melody in our heads or to sing the words out loud.
This is the first time we’ve had a music-generative AI flat-out refuse to produce audio.
Good performance… when it works
From here, we went to Suno’s website to get an idea of what the tech can do. The audio genuinely sounded great in our experience. The vocal performances were surprisingly good although not amazing. It’s not total gibberish like with Google’s Instrument Playground, but they’re not super clear either.
We couldn’t find out how good Copilot’s music-making skills are, but if it’s anything like the base Suno model, the content it can create will outshine anything that MusicGen or Instrument Playground can churn out.
Rollout of the Suno plugin has already begun and will continue over the coming weeks. No word if Microsoft has plans to expand the feature to other browsers although we did reach out to ask if this is in the works and if Microsoft is going to address the issues we encountered. We would’ve loved to hear the music. This story will be updated at a later time.
In the meantime, check out TechRadar’s list of the best free music-making software in 2023.