Microsoft Copilot: Everything you need to know about Microsoft's AI
Want to learn more about Microsoft's family of Copilots? Here's our guide to Copilot and Copilot in Microsoft 365, as well as GitHub Copilot.
Copilot is Microsoft’s take on 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 in addition to Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot tool for generating code, and the Copilot that lives on Windows and the web, which serves more as a general-purpose assistant à la OpenAI’s ChatGPT than a point solution.
Microsoft Copilot, previously known as Bing Chat, is built into Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, as well as Windows 10, Windows 11 and the Microsoft Edge sidebar. (Newer PCs even 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 a close working relationship), Copilot can perform a range of tasks described in natural language, like writing poems and essays, as well as translating text into other languages and summarizing sources from around the web (albeit imperfectly).
Copilot, like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, can browse the web (in Copilot’s case, via Bing) for up-to-date information. It sometimes gets things wrong, but for timely queries, access to search results can give Copilot an advantage over offline bots such as 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 can generate songs via an integration with Suno, the AI music-generation platform. Typing something like “Create an image of a zebra” or “Generate a song with a jazz rhythm” in Copilot will pull up the relevant tool.
On the subject of integrations, Copilot supports plug-ins for third-party apps and websites. There’s plug-ins for Instacart (for meal planning and cooking-related questions), Kayak (for trip planning), OpenTable (for restaurant reservations) and Shopify, to name a few examples, with more being added on a semiregular basis.
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