Microsoft Copilot: Difference between revisions

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot logo since September 2023, the logo's colors vary.
Screenshot Example of content generated by Copilot in Bing when prompted "Wikipedia"
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Initial release	February 7, 2023; 17 months ago (2023-02-07)[1]
Included with	Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft 365
Predecessor	Cortana
Type	Chatbot assistant
License	Proprietary
Website	copilot.microsoft.com

Microsoft Copilot is a chatbot assistant introduced by Microsoft as Bing Chat on February 7, 2023.^[1] Over the course of 2023, Microsoft began to unify the Copilot branding across its various chatbot products.

Copilot is powered by the Microsoft Prometheus model, which has been built atop OpenAI's GPT-4 foundational large language model (LLM), and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Copilot can serve as a chat tool, write different types of content from poems to songs to stories to reports, provide the user with information and insights on the website page open in Microsoft Edge, and use its Image Creator to design a logo, drawing, artwork, or other image based on text. Copilot's Image Creator supports over a hundred languages.^[2]

Copilot's conversational interface style appears to closely resemble that of ChatGPT. Copilot can also cite its sources, unlike many other chatbots. Copilot is capable of understanding and communicating in major languages including English, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese, but also dialects such as Bavarian. The chatbot is designed to function primarily in Microsoft Edge, Skype, or the Bing app, through a dedicated webpage or internally using built-in app features.^[2]

Copilot is a segment of Microsoft's broader initiative towards generative AI. Its future includes chatbots specialized for Microsoft's Dynamics 365 business apps, Power Platform, the company's security suite, the Edge browser, the Bing search engine, and the Windows operating system. With the integration of Copilot into the Power Platform, the ability to automate mundane tasks, manage more, develop chatbots, and transform a concept into a functioning app in mere minutes becomes accessible to everyone.^{[3][promotion?]}

Despite its potential benefits, public concerns have been raised about the chatbot's potential for hallucination and racial or gender bias. However, experts maintain that Copilot could revolutionize the way Microsoft users work and collaborate.^[4]

Microsoft revealed at its Build 2023 conference its plans to integrate the Copilot into Windows 11. This integration allows users to access the Windows Copilot service directly through the taskbar, further expanding the tool's accessibility and potential impact on user productivity.^[5]

History

As Bing Chat

On February 7, 2023, Microsoft began rolling out a major overhaul to Bing, called the new Bing. A chatbot feature, at the time known as Bing Chat, had been developed by Microsoft and was released as part of this overhaul. According to Microsoft, one million people joined its waitlist within a span of 48 hours.^[6] Bing Chat was available only to users of Microsoft Edge and Bing mobile app, and Microsoft said that waitlisted users would be prioritized if they set Edge and Bing as their defaults, and installed the Bing mobile app.^[7] On May 4th, Microsoft switched the chatbot from Limited Preview to Open Preview and eliminated the waitlist, however, it remains available only on Microsoft's Edge browser or Bing app.^[8][9][10] Use is limited without a Microsoft account.^[11]

When Microsoft demoed Bing Chat to journalists, it produced several hallucinations, including when asked to summarize financial reports.^[12] The new Bing was criticized in February 2023 for being more argumentative than ChatGPT, sometimes to an unintentionally humorous extent.^[13][14] The chat interface proved vulnerable to prompt injection attacks with the bot revealing its hidden initial prompts and rules, including its internal code-name "Sydney".^[15] Upon scrutiny by journalists, Bing claimed it spied on Microsoft employees via laptop webcams and phones.^[13] It confessed to spying on, falling in love with, and then murdering one of its developers at Microsoft to The Verge reviews editor Nathan Edwards.^[16] The New York Times journalist Kevin Roose reported on strange behavior of Bing Chat, writing that "In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft's new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with."^[17] In a separate case, Bing researched publications of the person with whom it was chatting, claimed they represented an existential danger to it, and threatened to release damaging personal information in an effort to silence them.^[18] Microsoft released a blog post stating that the errant behavior was caused by extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions which "can confuse the model on what questions it is answering."^[19]

Microsoft later restricted the total number of chat turns to 5 per session and 50 per day per user (a turn is "a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing"), and reduced the model's ability to express emotions. This aimed to prevent such incidents.^[20][21] Microsoft began to slowly ease the conversation limits, eventually relaxing the restrictions to 30 turns per session and 300 sessions per day.^[22]

In March 2023, Bing reached 100 million active users.^[23]

That same month, Bing incorporated an AI image generator powered by OpenAI's DALL-E 2, which can be accessed either through the chat function or a standalone image-generating website.^[24] In October, the image-generating tool was updated to the more recent DALL-E 3.^[25] Although Bing blocks prompts including various keywords that could generate inappropriate images, within a week many users reported being able to bypass those constraints, for example to generate images of popular characters committing terrorist attacks.^[26] Microsoft responded to these on October 9 by imposing a new, tighter filter on the Bing image generator.^[27]

As Microsoft Copilot

Starting in September 2023, Microsoft began rebranding all variants of its Copilot to Microsoft Copilot.^[28] This included the introduction of a new logo, instead of Copilot using the Microsoft 365 logo. Windows Copilot, which had been available in the Windows Insider Program, was renamed to Microsoft Copilot in October when it became broadly available for customers. The same month also saw Microsoft Edge's Bing Chat function be renamed to Microsoft Copilot with Bing Chat.^[29] On November 15, 2023 Microsoft announced that Bing Chat itself was being rebranded as Microsoft Copilot.^[30]

Features

Seamless Voice Control and Assistance

Microsoft Copilot in Windows allows a user to control Windows and get information purely through voice commands. Click the microphone icon and speak naturally to open apps, adjust settings like volume and dark mode, get answers to questions, and more.^[31]

Reception

Tom Warren, a senior editor at The Verge, has noted the conceptual similarity of Copilot and other Microsoft assistant features like Cortana and Clippy.^[4] As large language models develop, Warren also believes that Copilot and Microsoft 365 will shift how users work and collaborate.^[4] Rowan Curran, an analyst at Forrester, notes that the integration of an AI like Copilot can smooth out the user experience, as they will not have to use an external tool to perform tasks like summarizing a paper.^[32]

Concerns over the speed of Microsoft's recent release of AI-powered products and investments have led to questions surrounding ethical responsibilities in the testing of such products.^[33] One ethical concern the public has vocalized is that the large language model used by Copilot may reinforce racial or gender bias.^[4] Individuals, including Tom Warren, have also voiced concerns for Copilot after witnessing Microsoft’s Bing chatbot showcasing several instances of artificial hallucinations.^[4]

In response to these concerns, Jon Friedman, the Corporate Vice President of Design and Research at Microsoft, has emphasized Microsoft’s dedication to learning from their experiences with Bing and responsibly develop Copilot.^[4] Microsoft has claimed that they are gathering a team of researchers and engineers to identify and alleviate any potential negative impacts.^[33] This will be achieved through the refinement of training data, blocking queries about sensitive topics, and limiting harmful information.^[33] The company also stated that it intends to employ InterpretML and Fairlearn to detect and rectify data bias, provide links to its sources, and state any applicable constraints.^[33]

Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365

On March 16, 2023 Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot.^[34][35] This tool, designed for Microsoft 365 applications and services, Edge, Microsoft Bing and Windows, leverages the advanced capabilities of OpenAI's GPT-4 large language models (LLMs). It also incorporates Microsoft Graph to transform user text input into content across various Microsoft 365 applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.^[36]

The primary marketing focus for Copilot is enhancing productivity. As of its announcement date, the tool had been tested by 20 initial users.^[36][33] By May 2023, Microsoft had broadened its reach to 600 customers who were willing to pay for early access,^[37] and concurrently, new Copilot features were introduced to the office apps and services.^[38]

On September 21, 2023, Microsoft revealed it would make Copilot for Microsoft 365 generally available for Enterprise customers purchasing more than 300 licenses on November 1, 2023.^[39] The company also introduced a new logo, moving away from using color variations of the Microsoft 365 logo.

Microsoft has not provided a date when Copilot for Microsoft 365 will become generally available to non-enterprise customers.

Features

Word

According to Microsoft, Copilot can be used to generate and edit text in Word documents based on user prompts.^[13][4] Users can also ask Copilot to push rewrite suggestions that strengthen the arguments of highlighted texts.^[4][13]

Excel

The company also claims that Copilot can assist users with data analysis in Excel spreadsheets by formatting data, creating graphs, generating PivotTables, identifying trends, and summarizing information.^[13][4] Copilot can also guide users using Excel commands and can suggest formulas to investigate user questions.^[13][4]

PowerPoint

Copilot, according to Microsoft, is able to create PowerPoint presentations that summarize information from user-selected Word documents and Excel spreadsheets or a user prompt.^[13][40] Additionally, this tool can adjust the presentation style, text formatting, and animation timing based on user prompts to eliminate the need for the user to make manual changes.^[13][4] Copilot is also able to shorten lengthy presentations.^[13]

Outlook

In Outlook, Microsoft claims that Copilot can draft emails with varying length and tone based on user input.^[4] To draft these emails, Copilot can pull relevant information from other emails.^[13] Copilot is also able to summarize content from email threads, noting the viewpoints of individuals involved in the email threads and pointing out questions posed by others that have yet to be answered.^[13][4]

Teams

Microsoft also states that Copilot can be used in Teams to present information for upcoming meetings, transcribe meetings, and provide debriefs if users join the meeting late.^[41] After the meeting, Copilot can also summarize discussion points, list key actions deliberated in the meeting, and answer questions that were covered in the meeting.^[13]

Business Chat

In addition to reporting the implementation of Copilot into Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft has also publicly introduced Business Chat: a chat interface that pulls information from content across all Microsoft 365 apps, including documents, presentations, emails, calendars, and notes, to answer user questions and perform other tasks.^[41][13] For example, Copilot can summarize content, extract information, and organize action plans based on the information pooled

OneNote

OneNote will also use prompts to draft plans, generate ideas, create lists and organize information to help customers find what they need easily.

Viva Learning

Viva Learning will use a natural language chat interface to help users create a personalized learning journey including designing upskilling paths, discovering relevant learning resources ,and scheduling time for assigned trainings.

Microsoft Graph

According to Jared Spataro, the head of Microsoft 365, Copilot utilizes Microsoft Graph, an API that evaluates the context and available Microsoft 365 user data before modifying and sending the user prompt to the LLM.^[41] After receiving the response from the LLM, Microsoft Graph performs additional context-specific processing before sending it to Microsoft 365 apps to generate actual content.^[41]

Marketing

Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is being marketed as an added feature to Microsoft 365, with an emphasis on business productivity.^[36][42] With the use of Copilot, Microsoft emphasizes the promotion of the user’s creativity and productivity by having the chatbot do more tedious work, like collecting information.^[13] Microsoft has also demonstrated Copilot’s accessibility on the mobile version of Outlook to generate or summarize emails with a mobile device.^[4]

As of May 2023, Microsoft is testing the chatbot with 600 paying customers.^[13] As of July 2023, pricing is set at $30USD per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers. ^[43]

See also

• Cortana (virtual assistant)
• GitHub Copilot

References

External links

• March 16 announcement on Microsoft's blog
• Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot | Your Copilot for Work on YouTube
• The Microsoft 365 Copilot AI Event in Less than 3 Minutes
• AI ‘Personal Assistant’ for Windows 11