- Microsoft announces Copilot for Office apps.
- Copilot is a chatbot AI similar to Bing Chat but for work.
- The AI will come to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.
Microsoft has revealed the new Copilot functionality, which integrates ChatGPT (GPT-4) with AI for its Office (Microsoft 365) applications, which include Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
Similar to Bing Chat, the Copilot is a chatbot made specifically for business use. This tool helps you create material for documents, emails, presentations, and more. It shows up on the right side of the Office apps.
Twenty firms have been using the company’s new chatbot for testing, and more customers will be added in the upcoming months. Copilot is still in development, but you may activate the feature in Word, Excel, and OneNote.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 apps
This is a summary of what the new Copilot can do for the Office app suite.
Word
Copilot will let you request and create content in Microsoft Word. For example, you can request that content be produced on a particular subject or based on content from another document.
Of course, you may change and modify the material to make it uniquely yours, but you can also ask the chatbot to write it if you want to improve it.
Grammar and spelling checks are already included in the word processing program, but the new Copilot will also be able to look for errors and offer recommendations based on your preferences to enhance the document’s structure.
Excel
By enabling you to examine and evaluate the data in the spreadsheet, Copilot in Microsoft Excel will assist you in better understanding the information.
You can ask almost anything using natural language, just like you can with Bing Chat. Additionally, the chatbot is intelligent enough to identify data correlations, forecast what-if scenarios, and recommend formulae based on your requests. Furthermore, you will be able to quickly generate a PivotTable or SWOT analysis using the data.
PowerPoint
The new chatbot in Microsoft PowerPoint will assist you with creating presentations that are focused on a certain subject. It has the ability to turn a presentation into a Word document and a Word document into a presentation. Depending on the context of your question, you can ask the AI to do things like add movement to a slide or the entire presentation because it can interpret natural language.
Outlook
Based on your request or the contents of an existing email to which you are attempting to reply, Copilot will be able to automatically create emails in Outlook. You will have the ability to modify the message’s tone. Additionally, the Copilot will be able to distill long, complex email exchanges involving numerous individuals to comprehend not just what has been said, but also the varying perspectives of each individual and the unresolved questions.
Teams
The chatbot on Microsoft Teams will act as your helper and be able to summarize the key points of the meeting. Additionally, the Copilot in Teams will be able to respond to inquiries, recommend task distribution, and determine the most effective timetable for the upcoming meeting.
Business Chat
Additionally, Microsoft is launching a new experience called Business Chat, which links to the Microsoft Graph to access all of your data and apps, including contacts, calendar, notes, emails, documents, and presentations, enabling you to execute previously unattainable tasks.
Information from meeting transcripts, recent customer interactions, calendar entries, and more may be compiled by the new Business Chat experience and added to emails and presentations.
The experience will be accessible via Teams, Bing (if you are logged in with a work account), and Microsoft365.com.
The Bing Chat experience is comparable to Business Chat. Users should even be able to amend and correct entries, and it even includes similar footnotes to indicate the information’s source.
How Copilot works
Additionally, the business clarified that it did not develop Copilot by merely connecting Microsoft 365 to ChatGPT from OpenAI. The technology makes use of the Copilot system, which integrates ChatGPT version 4 technology with Microsoft Graph data and Microsoft 365 apps.
Copilot operates as follows: when you ask a question in Word, the chatbot sends the information to the Microsoft Graph so it can understand the context of the inquiry. From there, it sends the information to the ChatGPT language model. Before the response is printed to users within the application, it is first routed to the Microsoft Graph for additional security, grounding, and other checks.
Additionally, Microsoft stresses that the new Copilot is not flawless and will make errors. The business, however, is promoting the errors as something constructively incorrect that will nonetheless provide you with an advantage in the subject.