{"id":1325,"date":"2023-03-21T15:43:41","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T07:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/?p=1325"},"modified":"2023-03-21T15:43:41","modified_gmt":"2023-03-21T07:43:41","slug":"microsoft-announces-copilot-the-ai-powered-future-of-office-documents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/?p=1325","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft announces Copilot: the AI-powered future of Office documents"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Microsoft is announcing a new AI-powered Copilot for its Microsoft 365 apps and services today, designed to assist people with generating documents, emails, presentations, and much more. The Copilot, powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI, will sit alongside Microsoft 365 apps much like an assistant (remember\u00a0Clippy<\/a>?), appearing in the sidebar as a chatbot that allows Office users to summon it to generate text in documents, create PowerPoint presentations based on Word documents, or even help use features like PivotTables in Excel. Microsoft\u2019s Copilot\u00a0leaked earlier today<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt works alongside you, embedded in the apps millions of people use everyday: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more,\u201d said Microsoft 365 head Jared Spataro. \u201cCopilot is a whole new way of working.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Copilot can get you ready for meetings.<\/em>\u00a0Image: Microsoft<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Microsoft 365 users will be able to summon Copilot to provide information on an upcoming Microsoft Teams meeting, preparing people with updates on related projects, organizational changes like recent hires, and even updates on co-workers who might have returned from vacation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Copilot can also be summoned throughout Microsoft\u2019s Office apps and be used in Word to draft documents based on other files. The AI-generated text can then be freely edited and adapted. As Copilot is essentially a chatbot, you can even ask it to create a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation based on a Word document or analyze or format Excel data.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Copilot in Word.<\/em>\u00a0Image: Microsoft<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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That means Excel users can use Copilot to instantly create a SWOT analysis or a PivotTable based on data. In Microsoft Teams, the Copilot feature can transcribe meetings, remind you of things you might have missed if you joined late, or even summarize action items throughout a meeting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Spataro was quick to note that Copilot won\u2019t always be correct, though. \u201cSometimes Copilot will get it right, other times it will be usefully wrong, giving you an idea that\u2019s not perfect but still gives you a head start,\u201d said Spataro during Microsoft\u2019s AI event today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Copilot will also exist in Outlook, so you can spend less time deleting emails and responding. Email threads can be summarized, and Copilot can even create draft responses with toggles to adapt the tone or length of an email.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Microsoft 365 Copilot system.<\/em>\u00a0Image: Microsoft<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cTo build Copilot we didn\u2019t just connect ChatGPT to Microsoft 365,\u201d says Spataro. \u201cMicrosoft 365 Copilot is powered by what we call the Copilot system.\u201d This system combines Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with the Microsoft Graph of data and intelligence and GPT-4.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Copilot uses grounding to improve the quality of the prompts its given. If you ask Word to create a document based on your data, Copilot will send that prompt to the Microsoft Graph to retrieve the context and data before modifying the prompt and sending it to the GPT-4 large language model. The response then gets sent to the Microsoft Graph for additional grounding, security and compliance checks, before sending the response and commands back to Microsoft 365 apps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Copilot can generate a PowerPoint presentation for you.<\/em>\u00a0Image: Microsoft<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Microsoft is also planning to launch a Business Chat feature that works across all Microsoft 365 data and apps. It uses the Microsoft Graph to bring together documents, presentations, emails, notes, and contacts into a single chat interface in Microsoft Teams that can generate summaries, planning overviews, and more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled this new AI Copilot during a special AI productivity event this morning. After bringing an AI-powered chatbot to Bing recently, Microsoft is moving quickly toward the integration of OpenAI\u2019s large language models into its Microsoft 365 suite. Microsoft\u2019s announcement comes just days after Google announced similar AI features for Google Workspace, including AI-assisted text generation in Gmail, Docs, and more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Microsoft says it\u2019s testing its Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20 customers right now and will be expanding the preview in the coming months. \u201cWe will share more about pricing and details in the coming months,\u201d says Microsoft in a\u00a0blog post today<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While Microsoft is certainly moving quickly with its AI-powered vision for Office apps, there will certainly be concerns around this speed of innovation and the accuracy of its AI models, particularly when Microsoft 365 users may well be using them with business data in the months ahead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Copilot can create Outlook emails for you.<\/em>\u00a0Image: Microsoft<\/cite><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cWe make it clear how the system makes decisions by noting limitations, linking to sources, and prompting users to review, fact-check and adjust content based on subject-matter expertise,\u201d says\u00a0Spataro in a blog post today<\/a>, noting the company\u2019s AI principles. Microsoft\u00a0recently laid off its ethics and society team<\/a>\u00a0within the artificial intelligence organization. The team had been working to identify risks posed by Microsoft\u2019s adoption of OpenAI\u2019s language models throughout its software and services.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s left some inside and outside Microsoft concerned at the pace of AI-powered software, but Spataro doesn\u2019t share the same concerns. \u201cTo serve the unmet needs of our customers, we must move quickly and responsibly, learning as we go,\u201d says Spataro. \u201c\u00a0We\u2019re testing Copilot with a small group of customers to get feedback and improve our models as we scale, and we will expand to more soon.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Microsoft is clearly starting small to ensure any costly mistakes are discovered early on. \u201cWhen the system gets things wrong, or has biases, or is misused, we have mitigations in place,\u201d says Jamie Teevan, Microsoft\u2019s chief scientist. \u201cWe\u2019re tackling the long term implications and novel risks like jailbreaks. We\u2019re going to make mistakes, but when we do we\u2019ll address them quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Microsoft is announcing a new AI-powered Copilot for it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1326,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,3],"tags":[55,71,38,56,52],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1325"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1331,"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1325\/revisions\/1331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qssjx.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}