Microsoft announces Copilot for AI-powered 365 apps

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a new AI-powered assistant that can help users with a variety of tasks in Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Outlook, and Teams. Copilot can suggest code, text, and other content, and can also help users with specific tasks, such as generating a meeting agenda or creating a presentation.

Copilot is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, which is trained on a massive dataset of text and code. Copilot can understand natural language and can generate text that is both grammatically correct and relevant to the context in which it is being used.

The announcement by Microsoft comes just days after Google announced similar capabilities for its Google Workspace office and collaboration suite, a competitor to Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office 365). Google’s implementation of generative AI will rely upon first-party large language models and natural language processing, instead of OpenAI.

How to get and use Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot is currently in beta and is available to a limited number of customers—only 20 enterprise customers, in fact. A wider preview is expected to be announced soon, according to Microsoft. Microsoft has apparently learned from its missteps with unveiling a ChatGPT-powered Bing.

To use Copilot, users must first install the Copilot extension for Microsoft 365. Once the extension is installed, Copilot will appear as a sidebar in Microsoft 365 apps.

Copilot can be used in a variety of ways. For example, users can ask Copilot to suggest text for a document, to help them with a specific task, or to generate code. Copilot can also be used to translate languages, write different creative text formats of text content, like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, email, letters, etc.

Copilot is a powerful tool that can help users with a variety of tasks in Microsoft 365 apps. Even though Copilot is still in beta, it is already a valuable tool for many users. It can even assist with helping users understand different features within 365 apps, an AI-powered Clippy, basically.

Microsoft has declined to state how much it will charge customers for Copilot, and whether it is baked into existing subscription models or will come as an add-on. “We will share more about pricing and details in the coming months,” is the only statement by Microsoft in the announcement blog post.

Here are some of the benefits of using Microsoft 365 Copilot as they’ve been announced:

• Copilot can help users save time and effort by suggesting text, code, and other content.
• Copilot can help automate writing email messages in Outlook, and refine the content based on intended audience, tone, or more
• Copilot can help users with specific tasks, such as generating a meeting agenda or creating a presentation.
• Copilot can help users with translation and creative text formatting.
• Copilot is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, which is trained on a massive dataset of text and code.
• Copilot can understand natural language and can generate text that is both grammatically correct and relevant to the context in which it is being used.
• Copilot can act as an AI-powered guide of 365 applications, such as creating a PivotTable, a graph, or just make sense of the data that is presented to you

Microsoft 365 Copilot Videos: AI for the Office

Microsoft has released a few announcement and demonstration videos of Copilot capabilities across its 365 application suite. The videos for Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Teams Meetings, and Business Chat are up on YouTube now.

One thing is for sure: whether businesses and consumers use Microsoft 365 Copilot or Google Workspace, AI will completely transform productivity and how we work permanently.