Microsoft is adding AI-generated app review summaries to the Microsoft Store

Microsoft is making a big AI-focused change to the Microsoft Store: AI-generated review summaries are going to start appearing across the Microsoft Store, showing top-line synopsis of the reviews in addition to the usual rating of up to five stars. AI-generated rundowns like these are becoming increasingly common — see Artifact’s simple article summaries as well as the forthcoming search summaries Google is working on — and given Microsoft’s recent pushes into everything AI, it makes some sense why the company is introducing the feature.

That said, Microsoft didn’t detail how the information that surfaces in these summaries will be vetted or how the company intends to insulate the summaries against abuse — by bad faith review-bombing efforts, for example. Microsoft acknowledged our questions about this but didn’t provide answers as of press time.

Microsoft is also rolling out the red carpet for AI on the Microsoft Store with a special AI Hub, where the company plans to highlight all the apps folks can download that let them use AI in one way or another. The company says this hub will be designed specifically to guide customers on their “AI journey,” showing them where they can get started or continue working with AI-powered creativity and productivity tools.

On the back end, a new developer tool in the Microsoft Partner Center will allow developers to let AI suggest search tags based on metadata and “other signals” to help an app stand out in search results. The company will also be adding the ability to select multiple categories per app.

Finally, Microsoft announced a few updates to Microsoft Store Ads. The ads will soon start appearing in Bing search results; new video ads are coming to the Microsoft Store spotlight section; and June will see Microsoft Store Ads expand to 150 regions outside of the US. Microsoft has also updated its backup and restore systems to return Microsoft Store apps to where users had them in the taskbar and Start menu when they upgrade Windows or switch computers.