Microsoft is announcing today that its Microsoft 365 apps and services will soon have a new AI-powered tool called Copilot. People will be able to use the Copilot to help them make documents, emails, presentations, and much more. The Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, will be like an assistant and sit next to Microsoft 365 apps.
It will look like a chatbot in the sidebar, and Office users can ask it to add text to documents, turn Word documents into PowerPoint presentations, or help them use features like PivotTables in Excel. Microsoft’s Copilot came out early today. The head of Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro, said, “It works with you and is built into apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more that are used every day by millions of people.” “Working with Copilot is a totally different way to do things.”
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Microsoft Introduces AI Powered Copilot for Microsoft 365
Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot, a new AI tool designed to work with its office suite of applications, which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In a blog post published on Thursday, Microsoft stated that the program’s goal is to increase both productivity and creativity. Just one month later, it made this announcement about incorporating AI into its Bing search engine and Edge web browser.
Copilot will send users a first draught, which they may revise and improve while avoiding having to write, find sources, and edit it themselves. Microsoft Senior Vice President Jared Spataro claims that even though Copilot might not always be accurate, users will always benefit from its use.
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According to Jared Spataro, the new AI-powered tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot, can create PowerPoint presentations, Excel data visualizations, and first draughts for Word documents. Also, by enabling users to summarize lengthy email chains in Outlook and create email responses, the tool increases productivity.
With 20 partners, the IT behemoth is currently testing the tool, and in the coming months, it will be made available to more users. Microsoft also debuted Business Chat, which gathers information from a number of its products and uses AI to give users rapid responses to written inquiries.
Features That the Copilot is About to Bring to Microsoft 365
Although generative AI technologies can successfully draught documents or emails, they are also susceptible to problems like “hallucinations,” which are fabricated responses that seem to be accurate but aren’t. The Microsoft 365 Copilot, in Spataro’s opinion, can compel the creation of PowerPoint presentations and Excel data visualizations.
Also, it will distil email responses and summarize long email threads in Outlook. Twenty partners are now testing Microsoft 365 copilot, according to a second blog post from Microsoft, but it will be made more broadly available in the coming months. The tech giant also debuted Business Chat, which uses artificial intelligence to extract data from your Microsoft apps and present it in response to a typed query.
When Microsoft unveiled the new Bing in February, it made a commitment to include AI in more of its products. The business is one of the ones seeking to enhance their offerings through new AI capabilities. The Workspace apps from Google will now feature AI technologies, such as generative writing tools for Gmail and Docs, the company revealed earlier this week.
The company that runs WhatsApp and Messenger that is owned by Facebook, Meta, is experimenting with communication powered by AI, while Grammarly is launching an AI feature to write email messages, social media posts, and more. Workflow may be significantly impacted by the possible use of AI to summarize or synthesize within popular apps, according to Rowan Curran, a Forrester analyst.
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He added that the ability to summarize a white paper into a blog post within your main productivity software removes the friction of adopting these goods into workflows because the user doesn’t need to switch to a new application in order to use them.
Copilot for PowerPoint
With a clear instruction or structure, Copilot can either create brand-new presentation decks from scratch or modify existing ones to become them.
Copilot for Outlook
Copilot can summarize long email threads and respond to emails with prompts.
Copilot for Teams
Customers can get detailed responses from Copilot and get any information they might have missed.
Copilot for Word
By asking Copilot questions in Word, users can generate a first sketch, and the application will automatically add text to the document. Also, it has the capacity to alter and rewrite particular text passages. Also, Copilot provides guidance on how to convey your intended message while using the appropriate tone.
Copilot for Excel
Instead of employing complex algorithms, users can ask questions about their data collecting using common language.
What Will Be the Time We Will Have the Copilot for Microsoft 365?
The larger Microsoft strategy to incorporate AI into more of its products is represented by the release of these new AI-enabled capabilities. Other internet giants, such as Google and Facebook’s Meta, are also investing heavily in developing new AI capabilities for their services, such as chatbots and generative writing tools.
Even Grammarly is launching an AI feature to assist users in creating content for social media and email. Microsoft has admitted that 20 clients are currently participating in a test of Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the company plans to make the sample available to more users in the coming months. The company added that it would be providing further details, including pricing, in the near future.
Conclusion
Copilot employs the method of “grounding” to improve the inputs it gets. Copilot will send the prompt to the Microsoft Graph to obtain the context and data if you ask Word to create a document using your data before changing it and sending it to the GPT-4 big language model. The response is sent to the Microsoft Graph for more grounding, security, and compliance checks before returning with instructions to Microsoft 365 apps.
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Microsoft also plans to roll out a Business Chat capability that works with all Microsoft 365 apps and information. In Microsoft Teams, it combines contacts, emails, notes, presentations, and other files into a unified chat interface that can generate summaries, planning overviews, and other things utilizing the Microsoft Graph.
At a special AI productivity event very recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the new AI Copilot. After recently adding an AI-powered chatbot to Bing, Microsoft is moving quickly towards the integration of OpenAI’s expansive language models into its Microsoft 365 suite.
A few days earlier, Google had introduced similar AI features for Google Workspace, including text generation assisted by AI in Gmail, Docs, and other programs. Microsoft asserts that 20 clients are now testing its Microsoft 365 Copilot, and that the preview will be expanded in the coming months. Microsoft writes in a blog post of them, “In the months to come, we will publish more about pricing and details.
