Microsoft has updated its artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, streamlining the user experience and making its services more accessible under the unified Copilot branding. The changes include not only renaming existing offerings but also introducing new features designed to enhance workplace productivity.
Expanding Accessibility and Functionality
As part of these changes, Bing Chat has been rebranded as Copilot, while Bing Chat Enterprise becomes Copilot Pro, a version that includes commercial data protection policies. This decision expands on Microsoft's expansion of the Copilot branding across services. Last month, the company announced Microsoft Copilot, a unified AI platform comprising Bing Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Windows Copilot.
Copilot Pro is set to be made available starting December 1, 2023, through Microsoft 365 bundles such as F3, E3, E5, Business Premium, and Business Standard. Customers outside these plans can subscribe to Copilot Pro for a monthly fee of $5. Unlike the regular Copilot, Copilot Pro ensures that Microsoft does not use customer data for AI training, upholding strict confidentiality and privacy for commercial data.
Microsoft's response to inquiries about the cessation of the Bing Chat brand confirms that Bing will continue to play a vital role in the technology underlying the Copilot experiences, all the while maintaining its position in the search industry.
Enhancements to Copilot for Microsoft 365
Additionally, Microsoft 365 Copilot is now known as Copilot for Microsoft 365 and has been improved with new customization features, like the ability to choose between bullet points and paragraph forms for conveying information, and data visualization options. Users can now take advantage of the AI's capabilities to summarize email threads in Outlook, prepare for meetings by providing synthesized briefing materials, and generate thread summaries.
Moreover, Copilot integrates within Microsoft Teams, where it is capable of answering queries related to meetings without preserving any records of the conversation post-meeting. For users of other Office applications, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Copilot offers assistance in tracking changes made by collaborators, extracting insightful data and web information for spreadsheets, and accessing an enterprise media library for enhancing presentations.
With the introduction of Copilot Studio, Microsoft introduces a platform that allows for the addition of external data via pre-built or custom plugins, the creation of tailored workflows, and more granular control over organizational experiences through specialized IT tools. These enhancements are indicative of Microsoft's ongoing commitment to leverage AI for improving productivity and streamlining collaborative work environments.
With Copilot Studio, you can create and manage your own copilots and GPTs for Microsoft 365. You can design, test, and publish custom scenarios that connect to any data source, such as SAP, Workday, ServiceNow, or your own business solutions. You can also control the access, data, user settings, and analytics of your copilots and GPTs. Copilot Studio gives you a single web interface to handle the entire lifecycle of your customizations and copilots.
