Microsoft Copilot: Everything you need to know about Microsoft’s AI

Copilot is Microsoft’s tackle productivity-boosting generative AI, and it continues to develop and increase with Microsoft’s AI ambitions. Immediately, there are round a dozen Copilot-branded merchandise powering varied capabilities in Microsoft software program and companies, like summarizations in Microsoft Outlook and transcriptions in Microsoft Groups.

That’s along with Microsoft-owned GitHub’s Copilot device for producing code, and the Copilot that lives on Home windows and the online, which serves as a general-purpose assistant.

On this put up, we clarify the various Microsoft Copilots accessible and what they do, and the variations between the premium and free editions.

What’s Microsoft Copilot?

Microsoft Copilot, beforehand referred to as Bing Chat, is constructed into Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, in addition to Home windows 10, Home windows 11, and the Microsoft Edge sidebar. (Newer PCs actually have a devoted keyboard key for launching Copilot.) There’s additionally stand-alone Copilot apps for Android and iOS and an in-app Telegram room.

Powered by fine-tuned variations of OpenAI’s fashions (OpenAI and Microsoft have a detailed working relationship), Copilot can carry out a variety of duties described in pure language, like writing poems and essays, in addition to translating textual content into different languages and summarizing sources from across the net (albeit imperfectly).

Copilot, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, can browse the online (in Copilot’s case, through Bing) for up-to-date data. It generally will get issues incorrect, however for well timed queries, entry to go looking outcomes can give Copilot a bonus over offline bots equivalent to Anthropic’s Claude.

Copilot can create pictures by tapping Picture Creator, Microsoft’s picture generator constructed on OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 mannequin. And it may generate songs through an integration with Suno, the AI music-generating platform. Typing one thing like “Create a picture of a zebra” or “Generate a tune with a jazz rhythm” in Copilot will pull within the related device.

With reference to integrations, Copilot helps plug-ins for third-party apps and web sites. There’s plug-ins for Instacart (for meal planning and cooking-related questions), Kayak (for journey planning), OpenTable (for restaurant reservations) and Shopify, to call just a few examples. Extra are being added regularly.

Copilot additionally drives Copilot Pages, an embeddable digital canvas the place customers can edit and share Copilot-originated content material. Paying clients (extra on that under) get entry to BizChat, a business-focused hub that ties into Pages to drag knowledge from the online (and work information) to assist create issues like undertaking plans, assembly notes, proposals, and extra.

Which Home windows settings can Copilot management?

On Home windows 11 (however not essentially Home windows 10), Copilot can management sure settings and capabilities, performing as a digital concierge of types.

With Copilot, both by typing or utilizing Home windows 11’s speech recognition performance, customers can carry out actions on a PC like turning the battery saver on or off, displaying machine and system data, launching stay captions, displaying the PC’s IP handle, and emptying the recycle bin.

A toggle within the Copilot expertise on Home windows 11 switches between “Work” and “Internet” mode, with the previous bringing Copilot’s Microsoft 365 capabilities within the Home windows interface.

What’s Copilot Professional?

Copilot Professional is Microsoft’s premium Copilot product, priced at $20 monthly.

Copilot Professional clients get precedence entry to probably the most succesful OpenAI fashions (e.g., o1) throughout peak instances. And choose options of Copilot can solely be accessed with a Professional subscription, equivalent to higher-resolution pictures from Picture Creator.

Copilot Professional additionally provides customers entry to generative AI capabilities throughout the Microsoft 365 suite of productiveness apps: Phrase, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote.

In Phrase and OneNote, Copilot can write, edit, summarize, and generate textual content. Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint can flip pure language prompts into displays and visualizations (optionally grounded in knowledge from information and templates). And in Outlook, Copilot can assist draft e mail responses with toggles for adjusting the size or tone.

Extra options as a part of Microsoft’s Copilot Wave 2 replace are coming down the pipeline.

Copilot in PowerPoint will quickly pull in company-approved pictures from a SharePoint library, whereas Outlook will get a “Prioritize my inbox” functionality that summarizes every e mail (and provides insights like who you’ve been most responsive too). In late 2024, Outlook customers may even achieve the flexibility to “train” Copilot matters, key phrases, and folks of curiosity in order that these emails are at all times marked as high-priority.

In Excel, Copilot can format knowledge, create graphs, generate pivot tables and information customers by means of creating new formulation and macros. It will probably additionally make use of the programming language Python for superior knowledge evaluation – in pure language, customers can describe forecasting, danger evaluation, and knowledge visualization duties and Copilot will translate the textual content to the mandatory Python code to carry out these duties.

A future model of Copilot in Phrase will allow you to rapidly pull in knowledge from exterior Phrase, PowerPoint, and PDF paperwork in addition to emails, encrypted docs, and conferences. Elsewhere, in OneDrive, Copilot will summarize, present metrics about, and evaluate the variations between information for you.

Past the Microsoft 365 upgrades, Copilot Professional subscribers get panorama formatting choices and 100 “boosts” per day in Picture Creator (versus solely 15 per day totally free customers) to hurry up the image-generation course of.

Importantly, Copilot Professional doesn’t include Copilot in Groups, a Copilot function in Microsoft Groups that gives real-time summaries and motion gadgets whereas dealing with duties like figuring out folks for follow-ups. Copilot in Groups is unique to enterprise Copilot clients, that means these with an enterprise-class (or equal) Microsoft 365 license.

What’s Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Separate and distinct from the buyer Copilot SKU is Microsoft 365 Copilot, a group of generative AI add-ons to Microsoft 365 with an emphasis on enterprise apps.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is priced at $30 per consumer monthly and accessible to clients with a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Enterprise Normal, or Enterprise Premium license. It delivers lots of the similar capabilities throughout the Microsoft 365 household of apps as Copilot Professional, however with the addition of “enterprise-grade knowledge safety” and the Semantic Index, a back-end system that creates a map of the info and content material in a corporation to permit Copilot to ship extra personalised responses.

Microsoft lately launched Microsoft 365 Chat, for instance, a device that pulls data from content material throughout Microsoft 365 apps (e.g., Phrase docs, PowerPoint displays) to reply questions.

There are various, many Copilots in addition to. Right here’s a partial checklist of them and their “abilities”:

• Copilot in Energy Pages can generate textual content, varieties, chatbots, and net web page layouts, and might create and edit picture and website design themes.
• Copilot for Gross sales can assist write e mail responses to clients or carry out sales-related duties equivalent to sending summaries of Groups conferences by means of Outlook.
• Copilot in Microsoft Provide Chain Heart can proactively flag points like climate, financials, and geography that may influence provide chain processes.
• Copilot for Service can draft solutions to buyer queries through chat or e mail and supply a chat expertise for customer support brokers that pulls from data bases in addition to case historical past. 
• Copilot for Azure can recommend configurations for Microsoft Azure-hosted apps and environments and assist with troubleshooting by figuring out potential points and options.
• Copilot for Safety goals to summarize and “make sense” of various types of cyberthreat intelligence.
• Copilot in Material helps discover, put together, and visualize knowledge.
• Copilot in Intune helps handle safety insurance policies and settings and troubleshoot machine points.
• Group Copilot can assist handle assembly agendas in Groups and lengthen to Loop and Planner to create and assign duties, monitor deadlines, and notify workforce members when their enter is required.

Be aware that a few of Microsoft’s Copilots, like Copilot in Enterprise Central, are included within the base software program licenses and don’t require paying a further price. Others, like Copilot for Gross sales and Copilot for Service, price an additional $20 per consumer monthly or $50 per consumer monthly with out an energetic Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription.

Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio is a dashboard that lets clients give Microsoft 365 Copilot entry to knowledge of their, or a 3rd occasion’s, buyer relationship administration software program, enterprise useful resource administration programs, and different databases and repositories utilizing prebuilt connectors or connectors they construct themselves. Via Copilot Studio, clients can construct guardrails for Copilots and create and publish their very own custom-tailored “copilots.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot subscribers can faucet Copilot Studio to create their very own {custom} copilot by describing it in pure language. Copilots can filter to particular datasets for explicit groups or customers, or connect with an automation, plug-in, or third-party service to kick off actions or a workflow.

Copilot Studio can be the place clients can craft what Microsoft calls Copilot brokers. These AI bots — which may be “@ talked about” in Outlook and Groups — leverage reminiscence and data of context to navigate totally different enterprise workflows, studying from consumer suggestions and asking for assist once they encounter conditions they don’t know find out how to deal with.

Copilot brokers vary in functionality from easy, prompt-and-response brokers to extra refined bots — assume bots that may monitor e mail inboxes and automate knowledge entry. Microsoft gives quite a lot of pre-built ones, together with the Visible creator agent that generates pictures, designs, and shortly movies.

What’s GitHub Copilot?

To not be confused with the various different Copilots in Microsoft’s portfolio, GitHub Copilot is a set of instruments for producing code and supporting programming work. GitHub Copilot may be put in as an extension for IDEs together with Visible Studio Code, Visible Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains, or used within the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.

The generative AI mannequin underpinning GitHub Copilot has been skilled on billions of strains of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and dozens of different programming languages — lots of them hosted and accessible publicly on GitHub. While you’re writing code, GitHub Copilot suggests code as you kind; you possibly can cycle by means of recommendations and settle for or reject them.

GitHub Copilot may translate code into pure language descriptions, and Copilot Extensions enable builders to increase Copilot with third-party abilities. In February, GitHub introduced a ton of latest updates for Copilot. Amongst them: Imaginative and prescient for Copilot, which permits folks to connect a screenshot, photograph, or diagram to a chat, and Copilot will generate the interface, code, and alt textual content to convey it to life.

GitHub Copilot is offered totally free for college kids and for “verified” open supply contributors and educators. For people, it’s $10 monthly. For enterprise clients, it’s $19 monthly per consumer. And for enterprises, it’s $39 per consumer monthly.

Particular person, enterprise and enterprise subscribers get Copilot Chat together with GitHub Copilot, a chatbot-like circulation that’s conscious of your complete context of the code they’re engaged on and might reply questions on that code. Along with answering coding queries, Chat can assist builders repair errors and bugs and handle safety points by means of code evaluation.

The enterprise and enterprise GitHub Copilot plans embrace license administration, IP indemnity, organization-wide coverage administration, and added privateness options. Enterprise clients can customise for his or her codebases and data bases and fine-tune the underlying fashions, in addition to entry Copilot by means of the Microsoft Copilot on the net and use Copilot Chat on GitHub.com.

In April, GitHub launched Copilot Workspace, a kind of tackle AI-powered software program engineering. Workspace gives a dev surroundings that faucets AI-powered brokers to assist brainstorm, plan, construct, take a look at and run code in pure language.

Points with Copilot

Owing to the complicated and fraught nature of at the moment’s generative AI tech, Microsoft’s Copilots have their points.

The fashions sometimes make errors when summarizing or answering questions due to their tendency to hallucinate, together with whereas summarizing conferences. The Wall Road Journal cited an occasion the place, for one early adopter utilizing Copilot for Groups conferences, Copilot invented attendees and implied that calls have been about topics that have been by no means really mentioned.

As for GitHub Copilot, GitHub itself warns that it may produce insecure coding patterns, bugs, and references to outdated APIs, or idioms reflecting the imperfect code in its coaching knowledge. The code Copilot suggests may not at all times compile or run — and even make sense.

Safety and privateness issues loom massive over Copilot, as nicely. However maybe the elephant within the room is the unresolved fair-use query.

Like most generative AI fashions, the fashions powering Microsoft’s Copilots have been skilled on public knowledge, a few of which is copyrighted or beneath a restrictive license. Microsoft — amongst others — argues that the fair-use doctrine shields it from copyright claims. However that hasn’t stopped knowledge house owners from submitting class motion lawsuits towards the corporate, GitHub, OpenAI, and lots of extra over what house owners allege are clear licensing and IP violations.

Microsoft affords insurance policies to guard sure clients from courtroom battles arising from honest use challenges — a minimum of in slim circumstances. That doesn’t resolve the moral quandary of coaching fashions on knowledge with out permission, nonetheless, which can be greater than some clients can swallow.

This story initially revealed in August 2024 and shall be up to date periodically with new data.