In the beginning it was Bing. Then he became Copilot. Today a suffix, Pro, and a price are added to Microsoft’s generative artificial intelligence assistant: 22 euros per month. Copilot Pro is a premium subscription for everyone, bringing Copilot’s generative AI capabilities to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family users and additional features like the ability to develop custom assistants. The Redmond company has announced the general availability of the Copilot app for iOS and Android. Finally, Copilot for Microsoft 365 will be usable by an ever-increasing number of companies, even the smallest ones. “Since February 7, 2023, when we launched the new Bing with Copilot, it’s been a roller coaster ride. We have never stopped, and we won’t slow down in 2024,” says Divya Kumar, Global Head of Marketing for Search & AI at Microsoft. “We have reached an important milestone: over 5 billion chats and over 5 billion images created.”
What does he do
Microsoft first launched its AI-powered Office features for large businesses in November; two months later they are already available to everyone: Copilot Pro will be integrated into Word, Excel (currently in preview and only in English), PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. The free version remains available.
The demo is impressive: in Outlook, for example, you can ask Copilot to summarize an email and write a draft response, which you can then integrate, correct, rewrite and send, without ever leaving the app. Or you can ask copilot to analyze the email we are preparing, and here it functions – explains Kumar – like a writing consultant, in the sense that it analyzes the text and suggests changes, for example to make it clearer, to give a more assertive tone to avoid contradictions.
In Word you just need to propose a topic and the program produces rich and detailed documents, a bit like the free online version already does, but much more detailed and rich in information. However, there are no links here, and therefore it is always necessary to verify the accuracy of the references. Furthermore, you can ask Copilot to read a long document for us and then answer all the questions about the content: “Copilot in Microsoft 365 applications for private individuals uses the contents of files only when the user specifically asks to perform a specific action on that content,” observes Kumar.
And if the possibility of generating images in landscape format in Dall-E (through Designer’s Image Creator) is interesting, what you can do with PowerPoint is disturbing: you don’t need to know anything, neither about the topic covered, nor about how to use the program to have content-rich and visually stimulating presentations. We reserve the right, of course, to try the Italian version and analyze the result in detail, but the first impact is stunning.
Artificial intelligence OpenAI opened its GPT Store: how to create and sell an AI by Pier Luigi Pisa 11 January 2024
Come ChatGPT
Copilot Pro offers support for content development, such as writing or design, research and coding. It works on all devices, both in installed apps and in their respective cloud versions. It allows you to have access to GPT-4 Turbo during periods of peak demand for faster performance and, soon, will allow you to switch between models to further customize the experience.
You will be able to develop custom Copilots, tailored to specific topics, using the new Copilot GPT Builder (coming soon) with a simple set of instructions. Microsoft’s generative AI is based on GPT4, like GPT Chat, yet these custom assistants are not interoperable between the two platforms. “But we are working to make them become one,” Kumar anticipates to Italian Tech. Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced a series of specific GPT Copilots for purposes related to fitness, travel and cooking.
For medium and small companies
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now available to organizations of all sizes on the Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard plans. Microsoft is eliminating the 300-user minimum threshold for businesses and is moving forward with the availability of Copilot to Office 365 E3 and E5 customers (previously a Microsoft 365 license was required).
Microsoft also announced Copilot’s eligibility for Microsoft 365 for educators and education.
Trained on the entirety of your enterprise data including emails, meetings, chats, documents, as well as the web, Copilot for Microsoft 365 enables through natural language requests to significantly reduce time spent on routine, low-value tasks, such as meeting summaries on Teams or analyzing large amounts of data on Excel. All while respecting security, privacy and compliance requirements as well as Microsoft’s adoption of Customer Copyright Commitments.
L’app
The Copilot mobile app is now available for Android and iOS: it includes the same features as Copilot on PC, including access to GPT-4, Dall-E 3 for creating images and the ability to use images from your phone during chats with Copilot. The app is available on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.
Starting next month, Copilot will also be integrated into the Microsoft 365 mobile app for those with a Microsoft account. It will be possible to access Copilot directly within the app (on Play Store and App Store) and export the contents created into a Word or PDF document.
Artificial intelligence Stealing data from ChatGPT, using ChatGPT: this is how AI reveals names, surnames, faces and addresses of people by Emanuele Capone 03 December 2023