Microsoft adds powerful AI tool ‘Copilot’ to Word, Excel

Microsoft is integrating a phenomenal artificial intelligence tool like ChatGPT to its Office 365 products in a move that promises to empower users’ experience.

– A key point to note

Called “Office 365 Copilot”, the new tool is being integrated into Microsoft product suite including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails.

It will offer users capabilities to obtain drafts in these applications, speeding up content creation and freeing up workers’ time, Microsoft said.

It will compete with Google’s Workplace, unveiled last Monday.

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The tool is for now open to select business customers for testing.

Microsoft also announced a new product called “Business Chat,” a chat bot that will gather information from various sources, such as Word, Outlook, and Excel and answer questions like “What do I need to prepare for an upcoming meeting?”

Unlike the company’s Bing chat, which can attempt questions on anything available on the internet, Copilot is focused on information contained within customers’ Office 365 accounts.

That narrow focus is an example of how the broad-based technology, called GPT or “generative pre-trained transformer,” can be used as a foundation to build technology for more specific uses.

“We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, said in a live presentation.

The new integrations will “remove the drudgery from our daily tasks and jobs, freeing us to rediscover the joy of creation,” Nadella said.

Microsoft said its Copilot software could unlock more advanced features in its business products that most of its customers currently are not aware of or don’t know how to use.

– Powerpoint from a simple question

In a live presentation, Microsoft demonstrated the new capabilities that will allow customers to create PowerPoint presentations by typing a simple sentence, and create action automatic agendas based on what was discussed in a Microsoft Teams meeting.

It also said AI can summarize email threads and virtual meetings as they occur in its Teams collaboration software, a capability similar to live notes by AI that Google demonstrated earlier in the week.

Microsoft announcement on Thursday followed Google’s announcement of AI integrations into its own business products, known as Google Workplace and OpenAI’s GPT-4 announcement to complete a big week for the tech industry.

The AI race which has taken over the tech world in the past months was triggered after OpenAI’s launch of its ChatGPT last year. The model became a chatbot sensation that showed the public the capabilities of so-called large language models.

These AI models learn from past data how to create content anew, powering Microsoft’s new Copilot alongside other business and application data.