Microsoft just announced the AI-powered Copilot assistant for its Microsoft 365 apps and services. It's designed to help users create documents, emails, presentations, and more in the workplace.
It is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, and will accompany Microsoft 365 Apps as an assistant by appearing in the sidebar as a chatbot that allows Office users to call on it to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on documents from Word, or help use features like PivotTables in Excel.
AI will be an added service to the Office suite and Office 365
Copilot can also be invoked through Microsoft Office applications and used in Word to compose documents based on other files. The text generated by the AI can be freely edited and adapted, as it will provide a base on which to work and review, something common in the results that an AI gives.
In Microsoft Teams, the Copilot feature can transcribe meetings, remind users of things, and summarize action items throughout a meeting. Jared Spataro, head of development for Microsoft 365, warned that Copilot isn't always right, in ways that it will sometimes get it right, and sometimes it will get it wrong, sometimes it gives an idea that isn't perfect but gives the user an advantage.
Copilot will also exist in Outlook. There, message threads can be summarized, and you can even create draft replies with buttons to tailor the tone or length of a message. This system combines Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with Microsoft Graph of data and intelligence and GPT-4.
The system uses grounding to improve the quality of the feedback it receives. An example they gave is that if someone asks Word to "create a document based on certain data“Copilot will then send that request to the Microsoft Graph to retrieve context and data before modifying the request and sending it to the GPT-4 large language model. The response is then sent to the Microsoft Graph for additional baseline, security, and compliance checks before sending the response and commands back to Microsoft 365 apps. Microsoft also plans to release a Business Chat feature that works across all Microsoft 365 apps and data. There’s no word yet on when or what monetization plans they have for Copilot, but we can expect its inclusion to be an additional paid subscription service.”
Source: The Verge
