Microsoft Copilot: A Complete Guide to Microsoft's AI

Microsoft Copilot: A Comprehensive Overview

Copilot represents Microsoft's initiative in the realm of generative artificial intelligence, designed to enhance productivity. Its functionality is continually evolving alongside Microsoft’s broader AI strategy.

Currently, approximately twelve distinct products bearing the Copilot name are utilized to deliver a range of features across Microsoft’s software and services. These include functionalities like summarization within Microsoft Outlook and transcription services in Microsoft Teams.

Expanding the Copilot Ecosystem

Beyond these, GitHub Copilot, a tool developed by Microsoft-owned GitHub, focuses on code generation. A versatile, general-purpose assistant version of Copilot is also accessible on both Windows and the web.

Understanding the Different Copilot Offerings

This article details the various Microsoft Copilots currently available, outlining their specific capabilities. We will also clarify the distinctions between the premium and free versions of these AI assistants.

The goal is to provide a clear understanding of how each Copilot functions and which version best suits individual needs.

Copilot Features and Versions

Different Copilot versions offer varying levels of access and functionality. The core capabilities remain consistent, but the depth of assistance differs.

Key Differences Between Free and Premium

• Free Copilot: Provides basic AI assistance, suitable for everyday tasks.
• Copilot Pro: Offers enhanced performance, priority access, and integration with Microsoft 365 apps.

Copilot Pro is designed for users who require more advanced features and seamless integration with their existing workflow.

The choice between the free and premium versions depends on the user’s specific requirements and the intensity of AI assistance needed.

Understanding Microsoft Copilot

Formerly recognized as Bing Chat, Microsoft Copilot is now integrated directly into the Bing search engine, as well as the Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems, and accessible via the Microsoft Edge sidebar. Select newer personal computers even feature a dedicated key on the keyboard for quick Copilot access.

Standalone Copilot applications are also available for both Android and iOS platforms, alongside an integrated experience within the Telegram messaging app. This widespread availability ensures broad user access.

Leveraging refined iterations of OpenAI’s language models – a result of the close collaboration between OpenAI and Microsoft – Copilot is capable of executing diverse tasks communicated through natural language. These include composing creative content like poems and essays, performing translations between languages, and providing summaries of online resources, though with occasional imperfections.

Similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Copilot possesses the ability to access and browse the internet (utilizing Bing’s search capabilities) to retrieve current information. While inaccuracies can occur, this web access often provides Copilot with an advantage over AI bots that operate offline, such as Anthropic’s Claude, particularly when addressing time-sensitive inquiries.

Copilot facilitates image creation through its integration with Image Creator, Microsoft’s image generation tool powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model. Furthermore, it can generate musical pieces via a connection to Suno, an AI-driven music platform. Simply requesting “Create an image of a zebra” or “Generate a song with a jazz rhythm” within Copilot will activate the corresponding functionality.

Expanding on its connectivity, Copilot supports plug-ins designed for integration with various third-party applications and websites. Examples include plug-ins for Instacart (assisting with meal planning and cooking), Kayak (supporting travel arrangements), OpenTable (facilitating restaurant bookings), and Shopify. The range of available plug-ins is continually expanding.

Copilot also powers Copilot Pages, a feature allowing users to embed, edit, and share content originally generated by Copilot. Subscribers to paid plans (details provided later) gain access to BizChat, a business-centric environment that integrates with Pages to gather data from both the web and internal work files, aiding in the creation of project plans, meeting summaries, proposals, and other professional documents.

Copilot’s Control Over Windows Settings

Within Windows 11 (functionality may vary in Windows 10), Copilot can manage specific settings and functions, effectively acting as a digital assistant.

Users can utilize Copilot, either through text input or Windows 11’s voice recognition feature, to perform actions on their PC. These actions include enabling or disabling battery saver mode, displaying device and system details, activating live captions, revealing the computer’s IP address, and clearing the recycle bin.

A toggle within the Copilot experience on Windows 11 allows users to switch between “Work” and “Web” modes. Selecting “Work” mode integrates Copilot’s Microsoft 365 capabilities directly into the Windows interface.

Understanding Microsoft Copilot Pro

Microsoft’s Copilot Pro represents a premium tier of its Copilot AI service, offered at a monthly subscription cost of $20.

Subscribers to Copilot Pro are granted prioritized access to the most advanced OpenAI models, such as the o1 model, particularly during periods of high demand. Certain functionalities within Copilot are exclusively available to Pro users, including the ability to generate images with increased resolution through Image Creator.

Integration with Microsoft 365

A key benefit of Copilot Pro is its integration with the Microsoft 365 suite, encompassing applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. This integration unlocks generative AI capabilities across these productivity tools.

Within Word and OneNote, Copilot facilitates text creation, editing, summarization, and generation. In Excel and PowerPoint, it transforms natural language instructions into compelling presentations and data visualizations, with the option to base these on data from existing files and templates.

Outlook users benefit from Copilot’s assistance in drafting email replies, with adjustable controls for both length and tone.

Upcoming Features – Wave 2

Further enhancements are planned as part of Microsoft’s Copilot Wave 2 update, promising expanded functionality.

PowerPoint will soon be able to incorporate approved images directly from a SharePoint library. Outlook will introduce an “Prioritize my inbox” feature, providing concise summaries of each email and offering insights into communication patterns.

Later in 2024, Outlook users will have the ability to customize Copilot by specifying topics, keywords, and key contacts, ensuring that related emails are consistently flagged as high-priority.

Advanced Capabilities in Excel

Copilot’s capabilities within Excel extend to data formatting, graph creation, pivot table generation, and guidance on developing new formulas and macros.

Furthermore, Copilot leverages the Python programming language for sophisticated data analysis. Users can describe tasks such as forecasting, risk assessment, and data visualization in plain language, and Copilot will automatically translate these instructions into the necessary Python code.

Expanding Functionality Across Applications

Future iterations of Copilot in Word will enable the seamless integration of data from external sources, including PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents, emails, encrypted files, and meeting transcripts.

Within OneDrive, Copilot will provide summaries, key metrics, and comparative analyses of files.

Additional Pro Benefits

Beyond the Microsoft 365 enhancements, Copilot Pro subscribers receive access to landscape formatting options and 100 daily “boosts” in Image Creator, accelerating the image generation process compared to the 15 boosts available to standard users.

Distinction from Copilot in Teams

It’s important to note that Copilot Pro does not include access to Copilot in Teams. This feature, which delivers real-time summaries and action items during Microsoft Teams meetings and task management, is reserved exclusively for enterprise-level Copilot customers with qualifying Microsoft 365 licenses.

Understanding Microsoft 365 Copilot

Distinct from the consumer-focused Copilot offering, Microsoft 365 Copilot represents a suite of generative AI enhancements designed for integration with Microsoft 365 business applications.

The pricing for Microsoft 365 Copilot is set at $30 per user, per month, and is accessible to organizations holding a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium license. It provides comparable functionalities to Copilot Pro across the Microsoft 365 application suite, but incorporates “enterprise-grade data protection” alongside the Semantic Index.

This Semantic Index functions as a backend system, mapping an organization’s data and content to enable Copilot to deliver highly personalized and relevant responses.

Recently, Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Chat, a tool capable of synthesizing information from various Microsoft 365 applications – such as Word documents and PowerPoint presentations – to provide answers to user queries.

A wide array of specialized Copilots are available, each offering unique capabilities. Below is a partial listing of these Copilots and their respective functions:

• Copilot in Power Pages facilitates the generation of text, forms, chatbots, and webpage layouts, alongside the creation and modification of image and site design themes.
• Copilot for Sales assists in composing email replies to customers and automating sales tasks, including the summarization of Teams meetings within Outlook.
• Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center proactively identifies potential disruptions to supply chain processes stemming from factors like weather patterns, financial fluctuations, and geographical considerations.
• Copilot for Service drafts responses to customer inquiries received through chat or email, and delivers a customer service chat experience enriched by knowledge base access and case history.
• Copilot for Azure offers suggestions for configuring applications and environments hosted on Microsoft Azure, and aids in troubleshooting by pinpointing potential issues and their resolutions.
• Copilot for Security concentrates on summarizing and interpreting diverse forms of cyberthreat intelligence.
• Copilot in Fabric supports data exploration, preparation, and visualization processes.
• Copilot in Intune streamlines the management of security policies and settings, and assists in resolving device-related problems.
• Team Copilot aids in managing meeting agendas within Teams, extending functionality to Loop and Planner for task creation, assignment, deadline tracking, and member notifications.

It’s important to note that certain Copilots, such as the one integrated with Business Central, are included with existing software licenses and do not incur additional costs. However, Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service require supplementary fees of $20 or $50 per user per month, contingent upon an active Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription.

Introducing Copilot Studio

Copilot Studio serves as a centralized dashboard, empowering customers to grant Microsoft 365 Copilot access to data residing in their CRM software, ERP systems, and other databases – both internal and third-party – through pre-built or custom-developed connectors.

Through Copilot Studio, organizations can establish guardrails for Copilot behavior and develop and deploy their own customized “copilots” tailored to specific needs.

Microsoft 365 Copilot users can leverage Copilot Studio to construct bespoke copilot solutions simply by describing them using natural language. These Copilots can be restricted to specific datasets for designated teams or users, or integrated with automations, plug-ins, or third-party services to initiate actions or workflows.

Copilot Studio is also the platform for creating what Microsoft terms Copilot agents. These AI-powered bots – accessible via "@ mentions" in Outlook and Teams – utilize memory and contextual understanding to navigate business processes, learning from user interactions and requesting assistance when encountering unfamiliar situations.

Copilot agents vary in complexity, ranging from basic prompt-and-response bots to more advanced systems capable of monitoring email inboxes and automating data entry. Microsoft provides several pre-built agents, including the Visual creator agent, which generates images, designs, and soon, videos.

Understanding GitHub Copilot

Distinct from other Copilot offerings within Microsoft’s suite of products, GitHub Copilot represents a collection of tools designed to facilitate code generation and enhance the programming process. Installation of GitHub Copilot is achievable via extensions for popular IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains, or through cloud-based access utilizing GitHub Codespaces.

At its core, GitHub Copilot leverages a generative AI model. This model has undergone extensive training on a vast dataset encompassing billions of lines of code written in languages including Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and numerous others publicly available on GitHub. As developers write code, Copilot proactively offers suggestions, allowing users to review and either accept or decline these proposals.

Beyond code completion, GitHub Copilot possesses the capability to translate code into easily understandable natural language descriptions. Furthermore, Copilot Extensions empower developers to broaden Copilot’s functionality by integrating third-party skills. Significant updates were announced by GitHub in February, introducing features like Vision for Copilot, which enables users to upload screenshots, photos, or diagrams for Copilot to generate corresponding interfaces, code, and descriptive alt text.

Access to GitHub Copilot is provided without charge to students, verified open-source contributors, and educators. Individual users can subscribe for $10 monthly. Business subscriptions are priced at $19 per user per month, while enterprise subscriptions cost $39 per user per month.

Subscribers to individual, business, and enterprise plans receive Copilot Chat in addition to the core GitHub Copilot functionality. This chat-based interface maintains awareness of the complete coding context, enabling it to respond to queries regarding the current codebase. Beyond answering coding-related questions, Chat assists developers in identifying and resolving errors, bugs, and potential security vulnerabilities through comprehensive code analysis.

The business and enterprise tiers of GitHub Copilot include features such as license administration, intellectual property indemnity, organization-level policy controls, and enhanced privacy safeguards. Enterprise clients benefit from customization options tailored to their specific codebases and knowledge repositories, as well as the ability to fine-tune the underlying AI models. Access to Copilot is also available through Microsoft Copilot on the web and Copilot Chat on GitHub.com.

Launched in April, Copilot Workspace represents GitHub’s foray into AI-driven software engineering. Workspace provides a development environment that utilizes AI-powered agents to assist with brainstorming, planning, code construction, testing, and execution, all driven by natural language commands.

Challenges Associated with Copilot

Given the intricate and often problematic landscape of contemporary generative AI, Microsoft’s Copilot tools are not without their drawbacks.

The underlying models sometimes exhibit inaccuracies when providing summaries or responding to inquiries, stemming from a propensity for hallucination, even during meeting recaps. The Wall Street Journal reported a case where Copilot, for an initial user within Teams meetings, fabricated participant names and falsely indicated discussions on topics that were never addressed.

Regarding GitHub Copilot, GitHub itself acknowledges the potential for generating insecure code, introducing bugs, and referencing obsolete APIs or coding practices derived from its training dataset. The code proposed by Copilot may not consistently compile, execute, or even be logically sound.

Significant security and privacy issues also surround Copilot’s implementation.

A central, yet often unaddressed, concern revolves around the unsettled question of fair use.

Similar to many generative AI systems, the models driving Microsoft’s Copilots were developed using publicly available data, a portion of which is protected by copyright or subject to restrictive licensing agreements. Microsoft, alongside others, maintains that the fair-use doctrine provides legal protection against copyright infringements.

However, this assertion has not prevented copyright holders from initiating class-action lawsuits against Microsoft, GitHub, OpenAI, and other entities, alleging explicit breaches of licensing and intellectual property rights.

Microsoft provides certain safeguards for specific customers to mitigate legal risks arising from fair-use disputes – though these protections are limited in scope.

This does not, however, resolve the fundamental ethical dilemma of utilizing data for model training without explicit consent, a consideration that may prove unacceptable to some users.

This article was initially published in August 2024 and will be updated as new details become available.