Microsoft announces AI office 'Copilot'

Microsoft today announced “Microsoft 365 Copilot”, an AI-powered productivity solution that blends large language models (aka LLMs) with business data and Microsoft 365 apps.

Copilot will be incorporated into various tools including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.

The Big Tech firm also unveiled a new feature called “Business Chat” that works across LLMs, Microsoft 365 apps, and clients' calendars, emails, conversations, documents, meetings, and contacts.

Copilot will be priced and licensed “soon” as per the company. That’s all we know so far about availability (that’s a bit vague isn’t it?)…

Here is a complete list of tools within 365 Copilot:

Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes and creates right alongside people as they work.

Copilot in PowerPoint enables the creation process by turning ideas into a designed presentation through natural language commands.

Copilot in Excel helps unlock insights, identify trends or create professional-looking data visualizations in a fraction of the time.

Copilot in Outlook can help synthesize and manage the inbox to allow more time to be spent on actually communicating.

Copilot in Teams makes meetings more productive with real-time summaries and action items directly in the context of the conversation.

Copilot in Power Platform will help developers of all skill levels accelerate and streamline development with low-code tools with the introduction of two new capabilities within Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.

Business Chat brings together data from across documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files.

This development comes two days after Google announced a similar product offering (Generative AI for its Workspace apps).

That’s not very surprising given Microsoft’s massive investment in OpenAI, one can understand how the company wants to monetize GPT technologies. But yes… the Google announcement may have accelerated things.

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