Just days after Google announced Google Workspace’s AI generative makeover, Microsoft made a similar announcement. Your favorite Microsoft Office apps, including Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, are getting their own AI facelift.
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On Thursday, the tech giant announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, which integrates large language models (LLMs), including Open AI’s GPT-4, into Microsoft 365 apps.
Microsoft says that Copilot will integrate into applications in two different ways to assist you behind the scenes as you do your job and also actively when called upon.
Microsoft 365 Apps will be integrated with Copilot, which will optimize the apps to work with you and help you accomplish tasks as you move through your workflow, according to Microsoft.
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Microsoft Business Chat, on the other hand, will be an active assistant that can generate answers to any questions you have based on your Office apps and data, including your calendars, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts.
The example Microsoft provided was asking Business Chat to “tell my team how we updated product strategy,” to which the bot could produce a status update based on your morning meetings, emails, and chats.
GPT’s text generation capabilities will shine in Word, where Copilot can produce a full first draft to get you started on your writing process, according to the blog post.
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Microsoft says Copilot will also be able to help with visual projects, such as creating a presentation from a single message in PowerPoint and creating data visualizations in seconds in Excel.
Finally, Microsoft shares that Copilot will also help streamline your interactions with others. In Outlook, it will help you clean up your inbox in seconds so you can reply to important emails faster. In team meetings, you can help summarize key discussion posts as well as propose action items.
All of these features are similar to those found in the revamped Google Workspace, including text generation for Google Docs and emails, AI-generated presentations in Slides, and AI text summarization.
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Like Google, Microsoft has yet to make these AI features publicly available. Microsoft said it will bring Copilot to all of its productivity apps in the coming months. Microsoft is currently testing Copilot with a small group of customers to improve the model based on user feedback.
