Microsoft unveils Copilot AI for Office apps

Microsoft has unveiled Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Discover a new way of working with Microsoft 365 Copilot—next-generation AI capabilities embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day. Learn more: https://t.co/fqTtN1tRVQ pic.twitter.com/gNjCQfGkdz

— Microsoft 365 (@Microsoft365) March 16, 2023

The tool is based on a large multimodal GPT-4 model from OpenAI. It is designed to assist people in creating documents, emails, presentations and spreadsheets.

Copilot will sit beside the Microsoft 365 apps on a side panel as a chat bot.

“It works with you, embedded in the apps millions use every day: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and others,” said Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365.

Developers cited several examples of Copilot in Microsoft 365:

• Word — drafting documents based on other files. The AI-generated text can then be freely edited and adapted;
• PowerPoint — creating a 10-slide presentation from a Word document;
• Excel — processing tabular data with natural-language prompts. The tool can also create a SWOT analysis from a document;
• Outlook — sorting and deleting emails, summarising discussion threads, and drafting replies with a specified tone and length;
• Teams — transcribing and summarising meetings.

However, Spataro noted that the chat bot will not always be correct.

“Sometimes Copilot gets everything right, and sometimes—wrong, but useful, giving you an imperfect idea that still gives you an edge,” he said.

According to Spataro, Copilot is not simply an integration of ChatGPT into Microsoft 365. The system unites office apps with data and analytics from Microsoft Graph and GPT-4.

Copilot uses grounding to improve the quality of prompts. If a user asks Word to create a document based on data, the chat bot will send a request to Microsoft Graph to obtain context and data before calling GPT-4. The answer is then sent back for additional safety and compliance checks. In the end, the final result is returned to the original application.

The tech giant also plans to roll out a business chat feature that works with all data and Office apps. It uses Microsoft Graph to unify documents, presentations, emails, notes and contacts into a single chat interface in Teams.

The company said it is testing Copilot with 20 customers. In the near term, developers plan to expand the user base.

“We will share more about pricing and details in the coming months,” the press release said.

Back in August 2021, Microsoft introduced GitHub Copilot to help with writing code.

In February 2023, the tech giant integrated the GPT language model into the Bing search service.