Microsoft 365 (M365) is a suite of office applications provided by Microsoft. These are ubiquitous especially in organisations. The most well known applications are Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.
Copilot is an AI assistant that is integrated into these M365 applications to help make users more productive.
For example, Copilot can:
If your organisation has Copilot Enterprise Data Protection (note the badge/icon that shows this) you may be able to upload confidential data into Copilot. Always follow your organisations AI policy.
Here are some useful features of the Copilot user interface.
Dictate allows you to speak rather than type your prompt. (This is not yet full voice mode. Copilot will reply in text). Speak Aloud will use a voice to read Copilot’s response.
Copilot offers some example prompts to get you started. This expands into a gallery of prompts. You can save a prompt that you may want to use again and it appears in the prompt gallery.
There is a Google style search (but perhaps the chat is more useful).
A page provides a space where the user and Copilot can work interactively together on a document, for example, to draft a document, analyse a spreadsheet, write Python code. (Pages will have a familiar feel for users of Microsoft OneNote.)
M365 Copilot is embedded in the M365 applications. This makes it very convenient to use. It also has “read” the the contents of the open document (Word, Excel spreadsheet) so it knows the context of any prompts that you may provide.
On the other hand, Copilot may not use the most powerful LLM. For the best answer to a tough question, we may want to use an external LLM e.g. a ChatGPT reasoning model, even though it is less convenient to do so.