Microsoft today announced Copilot, a modern artificial assistant intelligences that will help Microsoft 365 users create Office documents.
Copilot will be an assistant which will be powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, and will be next to all Microsoft 365 apps. Sort of like the Clippy assistant, if you remember him.
It's expected to appear in the sidebar as a chatbot and allow Office users to call on it to create text in documents, or PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even help with features like PivotTables in Excel.
As he stated the head of Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro, “Copilot will be embedded in the applications that millions of people use every day: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more. It's a completely new way of working."
Microsoft 365 users will be able to call on Copilot to provide information about an upcoming meeting in Microsoft Teams, prepare people with updates about a project, report organizational changes such as recent hires, and even update colleagues who may they are back from vacation.
Copilot can also be called from all Microsoft Office applications and used in Word to compose documents based on other files. The AI-generated text can then be freely edited and adjusted.
Since it's essentially a chatbot, you can even ask it to create a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation based on a Word document, or analyze or format data of Excel.
However, Spataro was quick to note that Copilot won't always be right. "Sometimes Copilot will get it right, other times it will be usefully wrong, giving you an idea that isn't perfect, but will still give you a head start."
Copilot will also be in Outlook so you can spend less time on deletion emails as well as replies. Email threads can be summarized, and Copilot can even create draft replies with toggles to adjust the tone or length of an email.
Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella revealed this new AI Copilot during a special AI event this morning. After recently bringing an AI chatbot to Bing, Microsoft is moving quickly to integrate OpenAI's large language models into the Microsoft 365 suite.
Microsoft says it's testing Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers right now and will expand the preview in the coming months. "We'll be sharing more about pricing and details in the coming months," says a Microsoft post. Uh, what? would it be a joke?
Microsoft's announcement, however, comes days after Google announced similar AI features for Google Workspace, including AI-assisted text generation in Gmail, Docs and more.
And the battle of companies for AI has just begun!
