AI-Powered Microsoft 365 Copilot Is Getting An Overhaul With New Features

Microsoft has unveiled new Copilot features for programs like Microsoft Whiteboard, Outlook, and PowerPoint, as well as a new indexing tool that will enable Copilot to report on internal company data with more accuracy.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program

Earlier this year, Microsoft launched Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is a digital assistant based on OpenAI’s GPT-4, built to bring powerful new generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to the company’s product suite including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams.

A few months later, Microsoft decided to expand its preview access to Copilot through the Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access Program. The program is a paid invitation-only preview that will first be made available to 600 clients worldwide.

Before this extension, Microsoft had only given 20 customers the opportunity to test the AI-Assistant product. Despite the company not specifying when the deployment will start, it has, however, confirmed that those new customers will be required to pay an undetermined fee for the privilege.

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In addition to the paid preview access, Microsoft is also lacing Copilot with a set of new features and capabilities. First, for enterprise users of the Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 suite, a new Semantic Index feature is being released that generates a sophisticated map of both user and business data.

“For example, when you ask it about the “March Sales Report,” it doesn’t simply look for documents with those words in the file name or body. Instead, it understands that “sales reports are produced by Kelly on the finance team and created in Excel”, Microsoft explained.

The Semantic Index uses this conceptual understanding to determine a user’s intent and aid them in finding what they need. This feature is critical to getting relevant and actionable responses to prompts in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Copilot Boosting Creativity And Efficiency

Additionally, Copilot’s AI capabilities are being added to the Microsoft Whiteboard app which is a collaborative digital board used for brainstorming. The tech giant intends to make ideation processes more creative and effective by enabling users to ask Copilot to generate ideas and even organize them into themes through natural language.

Users can also ask the assistant to create designs for the visualization of the ideas using Microsoft Designer as well as summarize the content on the whiteboard.

While Copilot had already been introduced to Powerpoint, the company is also integrating DALL-E, a text-to-image generator developed by OpenAI, to enable users to ask Copilot for custom images based on their presentation content.

Moreover, Copilot is adding new coaching features to Outlook that provide writing assistance when composing emails with short deadlines or when handling delicate subjects. Users can get advice from Copilot on how to properly convey information in these situations with the right clarity and tone.

Users of Viva Learning will also receive a natural language chat interface that can construct upskilling paths, find relevant learning resources, and schedule time for required training as part of a personalized learning experience.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot has yet to see a public release or even an open beta. It is possible that a few more of these preview updates that extend capabilities may appear first before the tech giant makes it widely available.

Microsoft’s pace with the Copilot is reasonable seeing as generative AI products including Microsoft’s own Bing chatbot, have come under fire for having “hallucinations” which cause them to provide false information.

As such, Microsft and other companies with Large Language Model (LLM) products have resulted in putting a disclaimer that responses provided by these tools may be inaccurate as they attempt to improve the models and make them more reliable.

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