Microsoft 365 AI-Powered Copilot
Creating a PowerPoint Presentation can be tedious. If you are tasked to analyze the latest sales data, you know how time-consuming it is. Thankfully, Microsoft released an AI tool embedded into apps such as Teams, Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Introducing Copilot
According to Microsoft:
“Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more—and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. And it does so within our existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise.”
There are 20 enterprise customers who can use it to test and tweak the software. It expects to be available to a larger user base in the coming months.
Will it come at an extra fee? Microsoft didn’t elaborate or talk about the pricing.
Microsoft believes that the next-gen AI will help workers boost their productivity. Copilot is designed to eliminate the “drudgery from daily tasks and jobs.”
The Copilot will appear as a useful AI chatbot on the sidebar of Office apps. You can trigger it even when you are in the middle of a Word document.
For instance, if you highlight an entire paragraph, the tool will appear. It is like how Office prompts you when you make spelling mistakes.
You may use it to rewrite a few paragraphs using 10 suggestions of new text. Of course, we can edit it. Or you can ask the tool to generate an entire document for you.
Microsoft does not just integrate ChatGPT into its Office apps. It can teach you Office features. For instance, if you want to change the title’s color, you can just ask the chatbot, instead of having to research the Office’s features.
This tool shares some similar features with things Microsoft has already done in the past. But with this new tool, it is far more apt. It will be there to help you save a lot of time.
The system is customized for every Office app. In that case, there are various ways to use and command it. For instance, you can use it to write e-mails in Outlook. It can summarize all your emails on the go.
Is It a Perfect System?
It is impressive. But it is far from perfect. For one, it can insert racial bias into text. Worse, it can make things up and if you will not proofread it, you will end up having a document or email full of misinformation.
This is one of the traits of an AI. It is alarming. Plus, if you are going to use it in your email, it is a different level of privacy and data concerns.
Although AI gets things right most of the time, it does not get them right all of the time. For that reason, it is pertinent to read, re-read, edit, and discard if necessary.
Because of its flaws, Microsoft inserts some warnings so that you can see a message that says the content is generated by AI.
