Microsoft has announced the public preview of AI Shell, a tool designed to enhance your shell with AI capabilities. With AI Shell, the company says you can interact with various large language models and AI agents in a conversational way.
Here are some of the highlights of AI Shell, presented by Microsoft:
- Command-line shell (aish) interface
- A framework for building AI agents and other providers
- A PowerShell module for better integration with PowerShell
- Built-in AI agents to help you get started right away
With this AI Shell preview, you can choose from two agents: Azure OpenAI Agent or Copilot on Azure. Explaining the Azure OpenAI Agent, Microsoft states:
“Azure OpenAI Agent: Enhancing general purpose assistance, the Azure OpenAI agent can use any of the AI models provided by Azure open AI to handle large queries, natural language interpretation, or code generation. You can connect it with the developed Azure OpenAI models if you are looking for more privacy, manage the model settings or have a model trained with your data, in addition, you can also use the OpenAI models.
As for Copilot on Azure, Microsoft says:
“Copilot in Azure: This agent brings the power of Copilot in Azure directly to your CLI. It specializes in cloud-centric help, providing Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell commands, and helping you automate your Azure-specific tasks. To get started with the Copilot in Azure agent, you must sign in to Azure with the Azure CLI with an account that has the IAM role to access Copilot in Azure.”
Microsoft has two AI Shell features for Windows users. If you want it like a standalone executable which can run in any shell, there is the standalone executable.
There is also the AIShell module for PowerShell 7, which Microsoft recommends. It allows you to open the AI Shell in a sidebar of PowerShell 7, to work in both together.
To install AI Shell in PowerShell run the following command:
Invoke-Expression “& { $(Invoke-RestMethod 'https://aka.ms/install-aishell.ps1') }”
To run AI Shell issue the command Start-AIShell
