Copilot is Microsoft’s tackle productivity-boosting generative AI, and it continues to grow and expand with Microsoft’s AI ambitions. Today, there are around a dozen Copilot-branded products powering various capabilities in Microsoft software and services, like summarizations in Microsoft Outlook and transcriptions in Microsoft Teams.
That’s along with Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot tool for generating code, and the Copilot that lives on Windows and the online, which serves more as a general-purpose assistant à la OpenAI’s ChatGPT than some extent solution.
In this post, we explain the numerous Microsoft Copilots available and what they do, and we highlight the important thing differences between each.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot, previously referred to as Bing Chat, is built into Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, in addition to Windows 10, Windows 11 and the Microsoft Edge sidebar. (Newer PCs actually have a dedicated keyboard key for launching Copilot.) There’s also stand-alone Copilot apps for Android and iOS and an in-app Telegram room.
Powered by fine-tuned versions of OpenAI’s models (OpenAI and Microsoft have an in depth working relationship), Copilot can perform a spread of tasks described in natural language, like writing poems and essays, in addition to translating text into other languages and summarizing sources from around the online (albeit imperfectly).
Copilot, like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, can browse the online (in Copilot’s case, via Bing) for up-to-date information. It sometimes gets things flawed, but for timely queries, access to look results give Copilot a bonus over offline bots comparable to Anthropic’s Claude.
Copilot can create images by tapping Image Creator, Microsoft’s image generator built on OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 model. And it could actually generate songs via an integration with Suno, the AI music-generation platform. Typing something like “Create a picture of a zebra” or “Generate a song with a jazz rhythm” in Copilot will pull up the relevant tool.
On the topic of integrations, Copilot supports plug-ins for third-party apps and web sites. There’s plug-ins for Instacart (for meal planning and cooking-related questions), Kayak (for trip planning), OpenTable (for restaurant reservations) and Shopify, to call a number of examples, with more being added on a semiregular basis.
Which Windows settings can Copilot control?
On Windows 11 (but not necessarily Windows 10), Copilot can control certain settings and functions, acting as a digital concierge of sorts.
With Copilot, either by typing or using Windows 11’s speech recognition functionality, users can perform actions on a PC like turning the battery saver on or off, showing device and system information, launching live captions, displaying the PC’s IP address and emptying the recycle bin.
A toggle within the Copilot experience on Windows 11 switches between “Work” and “Web” mode, with the previous bringing Copilot’s Microsoft 365 capabilities within the Windows interface. More on that later.
What is Copilot Pro?
Copilot Pro is Microsoft’s premium Copilot product, priced at $20 monthly. It’s similar in some ways to rival generative AI chatbot plans like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus and Google’s Google One AI Premium, but not the identical.
Copilot Pro customers get priority access to probably the most capable OpenAI models (e.g., GPT-4o) during peak times. And select features of Copilot can only be accessed with a Pro subscription, comparable to higher-resolution images from Image Creator.
Copilot Pro also gives users access to generative AI functions across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. In Word and OneNote, Copilot can write, edit, summarize and generate text. Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint can turn natural language prompts into presentations and visualizations. And in Outlook, Copilot can assist draft email responses with toggles for adjusting the length or tone.
For customers with a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan, these functions work on the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote desktop apps. Those without are limited to the online versions of those Microsoft 365 apps.
Beyond the Microsoft 365 upgrades, Copilot Pro subscribers get 100 “boosts” per day in Image Creator (versus only 15 per day without cost users) to hurry up the image-generation process, plus landscape formatting options.
Importantly, Copilot Pro include Copilot in Teams, a Copilot feature in Microsoft Teams that gives real-time summaries and motion items while handling tasks like identifying people for follow-ups and creating meeting agendas. Copilot in Teams is exclusive to enterprise Copilot customers, meaning those with an enterprise-class (or equivalent) Microsoft 365 license.
What is Copilot for Microsoft 365?
Separate and distinct from the patron Copilot SKU is Copilot for Microsoft 365, a collection of generative AI add-ons to Microsoft 365 with an emphasis on business applications.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is priced at $30 per user monthly and available only to customers with a Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard or Business Premium license. It delivers most of the same capabilities across the Microsoft 365 family of apps as Copilot Pro, but with the addition of “enterprise-grade data protection” and the Semantic Index, a back-end system that creates a map of the information and content in a corporation to permit Copilot to deliver more personalized responses.
Microsoft recently launched Microsoft 365 Chat, for instance, a Copilot for Microsoft 365 tool that pulls info from content across Microsoft 365 apps (e.g., Word docs, PowerPoint presentations) to reply questions. In Excel, meanwhile, Copilot for Microsoft 365 can format data, create graphs, generate pivot tables and guide users through creating formulas and macros.
There are many, many Copilots besides. Here’s a partial list of them and their “skills”:
- Copilot in Power Pages can generate text, forms, chatbots and web page layouts and might create and edit image and site design themes.
- Copilot for Sales can assist write email responses to customers or perform sales-related tasks comparable to sending summaries of Teams meetings through Outlook.
- Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can proactively flag issues like weather, financials and geography that may impact supply chain processes.
- Copilot for Service can draft answers to customer queries via chat or email and supply a chat experience for customer support agents that attracts from knowledge bases in addition to case history.
- Copilot for Azure can suggest configurations for Microsoft Azure-hosted apps and environments and help with troubleshooting by identifying potential issues and solutions.
- Copilot for Security goals to summarize and “make sense” of various types of cyberthreat intelligence.
- Copilot in Fabric helps explore, integrate, transform, prepare and visualize data.
- Copilot in Intune helps manage security policies and settings and troubleshoot device issues.
- Team Copilot can assist manage meeting agendas in Teams and extend to Loop and Planner to create and assign tasks, track deadlines and notify team members when their input’s needed.
Note that a few of Microsoft’s Copilots, like Copilot in Business Central, are included in the bottom software licenses and don’t require paying an extra fee. Others, like Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, cost an additional $20 per user monthly or $50 per user monthly with out a Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscription.
Copilot Studio
Copilot Studio is a dashboard that permits customers to offer Copilot for Microsoft 365 access to data of their, or a 3rd party’s, customer relationship management software, enterprise resource management systems, and other databases and repositories using prebuilt connectors or connectors they construct themselves. Through Copilot Studio, customers can construct guardrails for Copilots and create and publish their very own custom-tailored “copilots.”
Copilot for Microsoft 365 subscribers can tap Copilot Studio to create their very own copilot by describing it in natural language. Copilots can filter to specific datasets for particular teams or users, or connect with an automation, plug-in or third-party service to kick off actions or a workflow.
Copilot Studio can also be where customers can craft what Microsoft calls “Copilot agents.” These AI bots leverage memory and knowledge of context to navigate different business workflows, learning from user feedback and asking for help once they encounter situations they don’t know how you can handle.
What is GitHub Copilot?
Not to be confused with the opposite Copilots in Microsoft’s portfolio, GitHub Copilot is a set of tools for generating code and usually supporting programming work. GitHub Copilot might be installed as an extension for IDEs including Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim and JetBrains, or utilized in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.
The generative AI model underpinning GitHub Copilot has been trained on billions of lines of Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go and dozens of other programming languages — lots of them hosted and available publicly on GitHub. When you’re writing code, GitHub Copilot suggests code as you type; you possibly can cycle through suggestions and accept or reject them.
GitHub Copilot also can translate code into natural language descriptions, and Copilot Extensions allow developers to increase Copilot with third-party skills.
GitHub Copilot is offered without cost for college kids and for “verified” open source contributors and educators. For individuals, it’s $10 monthly. For business customers, it’s $19 monthly per user. And for enterprises, it’s $39 per user monthly.
Individual, business and enterprise subscribers get Copilot Chat together with GitHub Copilot, a chatbot-like flow that’s aware of your entire context of the code they’re working on and might answer questions on that code. In addition to answering coding questions, Chat can assist developers fix errors and bugs and address security issues through code evaluation.
The enterprise and business GitHub Copilot plans include license management, IP indemnity, organization-wide policy management and added privacy features. Enterprise customers have the flexibility to customize for his or her codebases and knowledge bases and fine-tune the underlying models, in addition to access Copilot through the Microsoft Copilot on the net and use Copilot Chat on GitHub.com.
In April, GitHub launched Copilot Workspace, a form of tackle AI-powered software engineering. Workspace provides a dev environment that taps AI-powered agents to assist brainstorm, plan, construct, test and run code in natural language.
Issues with Copilot
Owing to the complex and fraught nature of today’s generative AI tech, Microsoft’s Copilots have their issues.
The models occasionally make mistakes when summarizing or answering questions due to their tendency to hallucinate, including while summarizing meetings. The Wall Street Journal cited an instance where, for one early adopter using Copilot for Team meetings, Copilot invented attendees and implied that calls were about subjects that were never actually discussed.
As for GitHub Copilot, GitHub itself warns that it could actually produce insecure coding patterns, bugs and references to outdated APIs, or idioms reflecting the less-than-perfect code in its training data. The code Copilot suggests won’t at all times compile, run and even make sense since it doesn’t actually test the suggestions.
Security and privacy concerns loom large over Copilot as well, but perhaps the elephant within the room is the unresolved fair-use query.
Like most generative AI models, the models powering Microsoft’s Copilots were trained on public data, a few of which is copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Microsoft — amongst others — argues that the fair-use doctrine shields it from copyright claims. But that hasn’t stopped data owners from filing class motion lawsuits against the corporate, GitHub, OpenAI and plenty of more over what owners allege are clear licensing and IP violations.
Microsoft offers policies to guard certain customers from courtroom battles arising from fair use challenges — a minimum of in narrow circumstances. That doesn’t resolve the moral quandary of coaching models on data without permission, nonetheless, which could also be greater than some customers can swallow.
