Microsoft Scout is a new AI personal assistant built on OpenClaw

Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, allowing businesses to assign a virtual assistant to employees to help with organizing calendars, expense reporting, email drafts, and much more. Unlike Copilot that lives inside Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Scout can see and do a lot more. “This is a personal assistant, it’s the first real personal assistant we’ve offered customers,” explains Omar Shahine, corporate vice president of Microsoft Scout, in an interview with The Verge . “I think it’s important for customers to understand that you’re going to get a phone call from this assistant, it’s a very different type of AI than chat.” Microsoft Scout can monitor local road traffic and your calendar to recommend the best time to leave for appointments, school pickups, and dinner dates. It also works much like a real assistant, surfacing things that it learns are important to you by reading Teams threads, transcripts, and email in the background. Microsoft is starting off slowly with Scout, and only releasing a desktop preview version to its Frontier customers in the US this week, but the goal is to have this running in the cloud and always on. A more limited preview will be available to a small number of customers in the coming months, before Microsoft rolls out the full cloud version more broadly. …