Copilot is Microsoft’s tackle productivity-boosting generative AI, and it continues to develop and increase with Microsoft’s AI ambitions. In the present day, there are round a dozen Copilot-branded merchandise powering varied capabilities in Microsoft software program and providers, like summarizations in Microsoft Outlook and transcriptions in Microsoft Groups.
That’s along with Microsoft-owned GitHub’s Copilot instrument 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 numerous Microsoft Copilots accessible and what they do, and the variations between the premium and free editions.
What’s Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot, beforehand often known 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 also 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 internet (albeit imperfectly).
Copilot, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, can browse the online (in Copilot’s case, by way of Bing) for up-to-date info. It generally will get issues fallacious, however for well timed queries, entry to look outcomes can give Copilot a bonus over offline bots akin to Anthropic’s Claude.
Copilot can create photographs by tapping Picture Creator, Microsoft’s picture generator constructed on OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 mannequin. And it could actually generate songs by way of an integration with Suno, the AI music-generating platform. Typing one thing like “Create a picture of a zebra” or “Generate a track with a jazz rhythm” in Copilot will pull within the related instrument.
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 a number of examples. Extra are being added frequently.
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 beneath) 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, appearing 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, exhibiting system and system info, launching reside 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 per 30 days.
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, akin to higher-resolution photographs from Picture Creator.
Copilot Professional additionally offers 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 might help 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 photographs 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 acquire the flexibility to “train” Copilot matters, key phrases, and other people of curiosity in order that these emails are all the time marked as high-priority.
In Excel, Copilot can format knowledge, create graphs, generate pivot tables and information customers by way 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, threat 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 shortly pull in knowledge from outdoors 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 objects whereas dealing with duties like figuring out individuals for follow-ups. Copilot in Groups is unique to enterprise Copilot clients, which 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 per 30 days and accessible to clients with a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Enterprise Customary, 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 not too long ago launched Microsoft 365 Chat, for instance, a instrument that pulls information from content material throughout Microsoft 365 apps (e.g., Phrase docs, PowerPoint displays) to reply questions.
There are numerous, many Copilots apart from. Right here’s a partial listing of them and their “expertise”:
- Copilot in Energy Pages can generate textual content, kinds, chatbots, and internet web page layouts, and may create and edit picture and website design themes.
- Copilot for Gross sales might help write e mail responses to clients or carry out sales-related duties akin to sending summaries of Groups conferences by way of Outlook.
- Copilot in Microsoft Provide Chain Middle can proactively flag points like climate, financials, and geography that may affect provide chain processes.
- Copilot for Service can draft solutions to buyer queries by way of 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 counsel 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 Cloth helps discover, put together, and visualize knowledge.
- Copilot in Intune helps handle safety insurance policies and settings and troubleshoot system points.
- Workforce Copilot might help handle assembly agendas in Groups and prolong to Loop and Planner to create and assign duties, monitor deadlines, and notify group members when their enter is required.
Word that a few of Microsoft’s Copilots, like Copilot in Business Central, are included within the base software program licenses and don’t require paying an extra price. Others, like Copilot for Gross sales and Copilot for Service, value an additional $20 per consumer per 30 days or $50 per consumer per 30 days 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 social gathering’s, buyer relationship administration software program, enterprise useful resource administration methods, and different databases and repositories utilizing prebuilt connectors or connectors they construct themselves. By way of 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 also be the place clients can craft what Microsoft calls Copilot brokers. These AI bots — which will be “@ talked about” in Outlook and Groups — leverage reminiscence and data of context to navigate completely different enterprise workflows, studying from consumer suggestions and asking for assist once they encounter conditions they don’t know deal with.
Copilot brokers vary in functionality from easy, prompt-and-response brokers to extra subtle bots — assume bots that may monitor e mail inboxes and automate knowledge entry. Microsoft supplies a lot of pre-built ones, together with the Visible creator agent that generates photographs, designs, and shortly movies.
What’s GitHub Copilot?
To not be confused with the numerous different Copilots in Microsoft’s portfolio, GitHub Copilot is a set of instruments for producing code and supporting programming work. GitHub Copilot will 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 educated on billions of traces of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and dozens of different programming languages — lots of them hosted and accessible publicly on GitHub. Once you’re writing code, GitHub Copilot suggests code as you kind; you possibly can cycle by way of ideas and settle for or reject them.
GitHub Copilot can even translate code into pure language descriptions, and Copilot Extensions enable builders to increase Copilot with third-party expertise. In February, GitHub introduced a ton of recent updates for Copilot. Amongst them: Imaginative and prescient for Copilot, which permits individuals to connect a screenshot, photograph, or diagram to a chat, and Copilot will generate the interface, code, and alt textual content to deliver it to life.
GitHub Copilot is accessible totally free for college students and for “verified” open supply contributors and educators. For people, it’s $10 per 30 days. For enterprise clients, it’s $19 per 30 days per consumer. And for enterprises, it’s $39 per consumer per 30 days.
Particular person, enterprise and enterprise subscribers get Copilot Chat together with GitHub Copilot, a chatbot-like stream that’s conscious of all the context of the code they’re engaged on and may reply questions on that code. Along with answering coding queries, Chat might help builders repair errors and bugs and handle safety points by way of code evaluation.
The enterprise and enterprise GitHub Copilot plans embody 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 way 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 supplies 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 advanced and fraught nature of at the moment’s generative AI tech, Microsoft’s Copilots have their points.
The fashions often make mistakes when summarizing or answering questions due to their tendency to hallucinate, together with whereas summarizing conferences. The Wall Avenue Journal cited an occasion the place, for one early adopter utilizing Copilot for Groups conferences, Copilot invented attendees and implied that calls had been about topics that had been by no means really mentioned.
As for GitHub Copilot, GitHub itself warns that it could actually produce insecure coding patterns, bugs, and references to outdated APIs, or idioms reflecting the imperfect code in its coaching knowledge. The code Copilot suggests won’t all the time compile or run — and even make sense.
Safety and privateness issues loom massive over Copilot, as properly. However maybe the elephant within the room is the unresolved fair-use query.
Like most generative AI fashions, the fashions powering Microsoft’s Copilots had been educated on public knowledge, a few of which is copyrighted or underneath 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 filing class action lawsuits against the company, GitHub, OpenAI, and lots of extra over what house owners allege are clear licensing and IP violations.
Microsoft presents insurance policies to guard sure clients from courtroom battles arising from truthful use challenges — a minimum of in slim circumstances. That doesn’t resolve the moral quandary of coaching fashions on knowledge with out permission, nevertheless, which can be greater than some clients can swallow.
This story initially revealed in August 2024 and can be up to date periodically with new info.