Copilot is Microsoft’s tackle productivity-boosting generative AI, and it continues to develop and develop with Microsoft’s AI ambitions. At present, 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 publish, we clarify the various Microsoft Copilots out there and what they do, and the variations between the premium and free editions.
What’s Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot, beforehand often called 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 shut 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 info. It typically will get issues unsuitable, however for well timed queries, entry to look outcomes can give Copilot a bonus over offline bots similar to Anthropic’s Claude.
Copilot can create photos by tapping Picture Creator, Microsoft’s picture generator constructed on OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 mannequin. And it could generate songs through an integration with Suno, the AI music-generating platform. Typing one thing like “Create an image of a zebra” or “Generate a song with a jazz rhythm” in Copilot will pull within the related device.
As regards 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 under) get entry to BizChat, a business-focused hub that ties into Pages to drag knowledge from the online (and work recordsdata) to assist create issues like venture 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, displaying system and system info, launching dwell captions, displaying the PC’s IP tackle, and emptying the recycle bin.
A toggle within the Copilot expertise on Home windows 11 switches between “Work” and “Web” 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, similar to higher-resolution photos 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 shows and visualizations (optionally grounded in knowledge from recordsdata and templates). And in Outlook, Copilot might help draft electronic 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 photos from a SharePoint library, whereas Outlook will get a “Prioritize my inbox” functionality that summarizes every electronic mail (and provides insights like who you’ve been most responsive too). In late 2024, Outlook customers can even acquire the flexibility to “teach” Copilot subjects, key phrases, and other people 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 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 required Python code to carry out these duties.
A future model of Copilot in Phrase will allow you to shortly 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 examine the variations between recordsdata 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 free of charge 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 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 patron 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 person per 30 days and out there to clients with a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Commonplace, or Business Premium license. It delivers lots of the identical capabilities throughout the Microsoft 365 household of apps as Copilot Professional, however with the addition of “enterprise-grade data protection” and the Semantic Index, a back-end system that creates a map of the information and content material in a company to permit Copilot to ship extra personalised responses.
Microsoft not too long ago launched Microsoft 365 Chat, for instance, a device that pulls information from content material throughout Microsoft 365 apps (e.g., Phrase docs, PowerPoint shows) to reply questions.
There are numerous, many Copilots in addition to. Right here’s a partial record of them and their “skills”:
- Copilot in Energy Pages can generate textual content, types, chatbots, and net web page layouts, and might create and edit picture and website design themes.
- Copilot for Gross sales might help write electronic mail responses to clients or carry out sales-related duties similar to sending summaries of Groups conferences by Outlook.
- Copilot in Microsoft Provide Chain Heart can proactively flag points like climate, financials, and geography which may affect provide chain processes.
- Copilot for Service can draft solutions to buyer queries through chat or electronic mail and supply a chat expertise for customer support brokers that pulls from information 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 workforce members when their enter is required.
Notice 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 person per 30 days or $50 per person per 30 days with out an lively 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 get together’s, buyer relationship administration software program, enterprise useful resource administration programs, and different databases and repositories utilizing prebuilt connectors or connectors they construct themselves. By means 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 hook up 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 will be “@ mentioned” in Outlook and Groups — leverage reminiscence and information of context to navigate totally different enterprise workflows, studying from person suggestions and asking for assist after they encounter conditions they don’t know how you can deal with.
Copilot brokers vary in functionality from easy, prompt-and-response brokers to extra refined bots — assume bots that may monitor electronic mail inboxes and automate knowledge entry. Microsoft offers a variety of pre-built ones, together with the Visible creator agent that generates photos, 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 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 skilled on billions of strains of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and dozens of different programming languages — lots of them hosted and out there publicly on GitHub. While you’re writing code, GitHub Copilot suggests code as you sort; you may cycle by solutions and settle for or reject them.
GitHub Copilot can even translate code into pure language descriptions, and Copilot Extensions permit 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, picture, or diagram to a chat, and Copilot will generate the interface, code, and alt textual content to deliver it to life.
GitHub Copilot is out there free of charge for college kids 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 person. And for enterprises, it’s $39 per person per 30 days.
Particular person, enterprise and enterprise subscribers get Copilot Chat together with GitHub Copilot, a chatbot-like movement that’s conscious of the whole context of the code they’re engaged on and might reply questions on that code. Along with answering coding queries, Chat might help builders repair errors and bugs and tackle safety points by 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 information bases and fine-tune the underlying fashions, in addition to entry Copilot by the Microsoft Copilot on the internet and use Copilot Chat on GitHub.com.
In April, GitHub launched Copilot Workspace, a type of tackle AI-powered software program engineering. Workspace offers a dev atmosphere 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 this time’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 had been about topics that had been by no means really mentioned.
As for GitHub Copilot, GitHub itself warns that it could 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 at all times compile or run — and even make sense.
Safety and privateness considerations 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 skilled on public knowledge, a few of which is copyrighted or below a restrictive license. Microsoft — amongst others — argues that the fair-use doctrine shields it from copyright claims. However that hasn’t stopped knowledge homeowners from submitting class motion lawsuits towards the corporate, GitHub, OpenAI, and plenty of extra over what homeowners allege are clear licensing and IP violations.
Microsoft gives insurance policies to guard sure clients from courtroom battles arising from honest use challenges — at the very least in slender 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 will likely be up to date periodically with new info.
