Microsoft has announced Copilot, a new AI-powered tool for Office apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.
The company says that they didn’t create Copilot by only plugging ChatGPT from OpenAI to Microsoft 365. The technology uses the “Copilot system,” which is the combination of the Microsoft 365 apps with the Microsoft Graph data and the technology of ChatGPT version 4.
Copilot powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI will appear in the sidebar of Office apps, which will work much like an assistant to help users in generating content for documents, emails, presentations, and more.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Viva, and Teams will all support Copilot
Microsoft has also introduced Business Chat, which is a new experience that connects to the Microsoft Graph to access all your data and apps, including documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes, and contacts, to perform tasks that were never possible before.
With the new AI tools, users will be able to do the following:
- In Word: Users can ask Copilot to generate content on a certain topic or based on the content from another document, refine the content by asking the chatbot to do the writing, and edit and adapt the content to make it theirs. The chatbot also checks for mistakes and makes suggestions based on users’ preferences to improve the crafting of the document.
- In Exel: Copilot will assist users to make more sense of the information by analyzing and exploring the data in the spreadsheet. Users can ask virtually anything using natural language. The chatbot is also smart enough to suggest formulas based on queries, predict “what if” scenarios, and find data correlations. In addition, based on data users can instantly create a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis or a Pivot Table.
- In PowerPoint: Copilot will help users to create presentations based on a specific topic, convert a Word document into a presentation, and convert a presentation into a Word document. The AI also understands natural language, users can ask things like inserting animation into a slide or the entire presentation based on the context of your query.
- In Outlook: Copilot can generate emails automatically based on a user’s request or the contents of an existing email to who a user is trying to respond. It can also adjust the tone of the message and summarize it.
- Teams: Copilot will become an assistant that can generate a recap of the most important parts of the meeting. It can also answer queries, suggest task delegation, and find the best schedule for the next meeting.
- In new Business Chat experience: This feature can summarize information from meeting transcripts, recent contacts with customers, entries in your calendar, and more that you can then insert into presentations and emails. The experience will be available from Microsoft365.com, Bing, and through Teams. It also includes similar footnotes to show the source of information, and users should even be able to update and correct entries.
Microsoft has been testing the new Copilot with 20 organizations and will soon expand to more customers.
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