Microsoft has announced that its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Copilot, will be made available in other Office applications, following its initial introduction in Edge, Bing and Skype. Copilot is designed to help users with creating presentations, completing tasks and tracking activities. It will be integrated with the Microsoft 365 suite of products and given the suffix Copilot in their respective names. Users can use natural language to control Excel and ask Copilot to create PowerPoint slides, generating them from Word documents. The AI can also create graphics based on text prompts.
The new Copilot system is a combination of the Microsoft 365 apps plus Microsoft’s graph (including the user’s own data) and a large language model. Each application will have its own Copilot sidebar that is similar to the new Bing in Edge. Users can ask for tasks by selecting the button and entering prompts, and the conversation window will provide step-by-step instructions. For example, a user could prompt Copilot to summarize the content or analyze this data. The system is designed to speed up tasks with practice, but it is unclear whether laymen will be able to use it effectively.
Microsoft’s AI Copilot is similar to Google’s new Pathway Language Model (PaLM) that has been introduced in Workspace services Docs and Slides, and will also be incorporated into Gmail. Copilot is a move away from autopilot and towards copilot, and it aims to serve users directly. Business Chat, a personal assistant that can be accessed via Teams or Bing, can be used to request information in the chat, such as a summary of the last conversation or a list of meeting participants. Business Chat can access various sources, such as the user’s calendar. It is not yet known when all functions of the Copilot system will be available.
