Microsoft releases fourth preview of AI Shell with Mac improvements

Microsoft has just released the fourth preview of its AI Shell tool with several notable improvements. The big changes in this update include macOS support improvements, support for Microsoft Entra ID, Invoke-AIShell command additions, support for the Phi Silica agent, and other minor improvements.

As a bit of background, Microsoft’s AI Shell is an interactive shell that gives you a chat interface to various large language models. The shell gives you access to agents that connect to different AI models and providers. Through the shell, users can interact with agents conversationally.

The biggest change is this update are the significant improvements made to the macOS sidecar experience when using iTerm2. Microsoft says that this side car experience was previously unreliable and didn’t support the /code post command. With this update, the experience is more reliable and brings feature parity with your experience on Windows. To use the sidecar mode, Microsoft says you need to run PowerShell 7 in iTerm2.

Another pretty notable update is the added support for the experimental agent, Phi Silica. This agent leverages the built-in Phi Silica model that’s included with Copilot+ PCs, giving you an offline experience with AI Shell. Once massive caveat, though, is that this agent isn’t shipped with AI Shell by default. If you want to use it, you need to clone the repo and build the code yourself. You can learn how to do this here. Please keep in mind that the agent is still experimental and you should expect breakage in future releases.

Another change that Microsoft has introduced is the added support for Entra ID authentication to Azure OpenAI instances. This allows you to access the Azure OpenAI resources without needing to store keys in a configuration file.

Finally, there are new additional parameters that you can apply when running the Invoke-AIShell command to allow for easier use of the side pane. The first parameter is -PostCode which lets you post code generated from the side pane to the connected PowerShell session, reducing the need to switch between the side pane and terminal to run the /code post command.

The second parameter is -CopyCode which lets you copy code from the side pane without using the /code copy command. Finally, the -Exit parameter lets you exit the side pane without using the /exit command.

The other minor improvements are:

• Updated model information to support latest OpenAI models
• Add /clear as an alias to the command /cls to clear console in AIShell
• Update installation script to install the AIShell module on macOS too
• Enhanced model management and system prompt integration in OllamaAgent

To install Preview 4 of AI Shell, open up PowerShell and run the following command:

Invoke-Expression "& { $(Invoke-RestMethod 'https://aka.ms/install-aishell.ps1') }"

You can provide any feedback you may have in the GitHub repository.