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, cautioned that Copilot isn't always accurate ; sometimes it will be right, sometimes it will be wrong, and sometimes it will offer an insight that, while not perfect, 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 instructions it receives. One example they gave is that if someone asks Word to " create a document based on certain data ," Copilot will send that request to Microsoft Graph to retrieve the context and data before modifying the request and sending it to the large language model GPT-4. The response is then sent back to Microsoft Graph for additional foundation, security, and compliance checks before sending the response and commands back to Microsoft 365 applications. Microsoft also plans to launch a Business Chat feature that works across all Microsoft 365 data and applications. For now, there's no word 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