Microsoft Copilot: New AI Tool Will Write Your Documents, Create Your Powerpoints and Skip Your Meetings

Matt Harris

17/03/2023 10:46 AM

Microsoft has announced a new AI-powered Copilot for its Microsoft 365 apps and services.

The Copilot, powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, will assist people with generating documents, emails, presentations, and other tasks.

It will appear in the sidebar as a chatbot that allows Office users to summon it to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even help use features like PivotTables in Excel.

A recorded video even showed the bot summarising calls, taking notes during meetings, and answering questions about what people had said during them.

Spataro, Microsoft 365 head, notes that Copilot won't always be correct, but the system uses grounding to improve the quality of prompts it's given. The response is then sent to the Microsoft Graph for additional grounding, security, and compliance checks, before sending the response and commands back to Microsoft 365 apps.

The tech company says it's testing its Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers right now and will be expanding the preview in the coming months.

AI in the Headlines

Microsoft's announcement comes just days after Google announced similar AI features for Google Workspace, including AI-assisted text generation in Gmail, Docs, and more.

Microsoft is moving quickly toward the integration of OpenAI's large language models into its Microsoft 365 suite. However, concerns may arise around the accuracy of its AI models, particularly when Microsoft 365 users may use them with business data in the months ahead.

Despite this, Microsoft recently laid off its ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization, leaving some inside and outside the company concerned at the pace of AI-powered software.

And the Windows developer isn't the only one making headlines in the AI space. Elon Musk has recruited a team to build an 'anit-woke' ChatgGPT rival, while Slack has made big strides to implement GPT3 into its platform.

Investment in AI is also soaring in China, where Google-like search company Baidu last night showed off its own ChatGPT-like assistant called Ernie.