Microsoft Launches New 365 Copilot AI Assistant To Compete With Google

Microsoft now has its own AI assistant for its Microsoft 365 apps.

The California-based tech giant recently announced its new Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant to assist people through its use of OpenAI's GPT-4.

Microsoft's announcement follows the information leak about its new Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant, which happened a mere hours before the company revealed it.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Details

Microsoft mentioned that Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI assistant for its Microsoft 365 that combines large language models (LLMs) with users' data in the Microsoft Graph and 365 apps, turning their users into "the most powerful productivity tool on the planet."

The tech giant stated that its new AI assistant would work alongside users through the Microsoft 365 apps they use, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, allowing them to be creative, productive, analytical, and expressive.

For instance, Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes and helps create documents alongside people as they work, while it turns ideas into a designed presentation through natural language commands in PowerPoint.

On the other hand, Copilot can help users unlock insights, identify trends, or create professional-looking data visualizations in Excel in a fraction of the time people normally take. Additionally, Copilot can help synthesize and manage users' inboxes, allowing them more time to communicate with people from work.

Interestingly, Copilot in Microsoft Teams can make meetings more productive by generating real-time summaries and action items directly in the context of an ongoing conversation. Meanwhile, it can help developers accelerate and streamline development with low-code tools thanks to two new capabilities within Microsoft Power Platform's Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.

Last but not least is its new feature, Business chat, which can compile data from across documents, presentations, emails, calendars, notes, and contacts to help users summarize chats, write emails, and even write plans based on other project files.

Users can give Copilot a natural language prompt like "Tell my team how we updated the product strategy" through Business Chats, and it will create a status update based on the morning's meetings, emails, and chat threads.

Competition With Google's AI

Microsoft's release of its Microsoft 365 Copilot AI assistant comes at an auspicious time - Google also announced its own AI features for two of its apps: its popular email provider, Gmail, and a "magic wand" to draft prose in its word processor, Google Docs, per Reuters.

The publication was quick to note that Microsoft's new AI assistant showed similar capabilities as Google's, rivaling the search giant's own AI assistant.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate president for Modern Work and Business Applications, mentioned that Copilot delivers relevant and actionable results by grounding itself in users' business content and context, and that it's built on Microsoft's comprehensive approach to security, compliance, privacy, and responsible AI.

"Copilot marks a new era of computing that will fundamentally transform the way we work," Spataro added.