Microsoft has announced a GPT-4 powered AI assistant for the Microsoft 365 Office apps named ‘Copilot’, in an impressive array of preview videos.

Copilot promises to bring OpenAI’s groundbreaking natural language assistant into Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Teams and more – helping users to write documents automatically with prompts, analyse spreadsheets and more.

Copilot can also use other Office documents as its source material, allowing powerful cross referencing commands such as ‘Make a Presentation based on my notes in Document.docx’, or copy styles based on examples of your other work.

The new tool, announced at Microsoft’s ‘Future of Work’ event in March, follows a string of recent Chat GPT related developments for the tech giant – which Microsoft promises to dramatically cut the time required to produce first-drafts, as well as rapidly cross-reference with data the user doesn’t have to hand.

Within Microsoft Teams, Copilot promises to summarise meetings based on text analysis of the transcript, or even recap for late attendees based on what they have missed.

Unlike the original ChatGPT version 3 preview, Copilot promises to implement some of the advances used in the trial version of Bing – with references and links embedded inside the AI’s responses demonstrating why it chose that answer.

Don’t expect to see Chat GPT 4 doing all your work for you quite yet though – Copilot remains in a trial phase with twenty select Microsoft customers, with the preview set to expand in coming months. (No Clippy, I wasn’t trying to write a letter – Copilot will do it for me.)

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Microsoft have released an early preview of AI-powered search integrated into Bing.

Available via Bing.com, the new tool is the first sign of Microsoft’s multibillion dollar investment in artificial intelligence company OpenAI – and uses the same technology first seen in the open preview of ChatGPT 3.5. AI ‘Copilot’ now not only delivers search results, but can generates longer text-based responses to questions, and form responses to more abstract queries that don’t have an obvious web destination.

The move comes just 48 hours after Google’s rival AI chatbot, Bard, generated a factual error in a promotional video, wiping an estimated $100bn off Google’s total market value.

ChatGPT’s ‘chat prompt’ format also allows the user to respond to Bing in turn, and continue the conversation to get a refined response without having to restart their search from scratch.

In each case Bing’s responses contain automatically embedded links that allow the user to follow-up the origins of each recommendation, even where the citations originate from a wide range of sources.

A new sidebar in Microsoft Edge takes this one step further by allowing Bing to ‘read’ each web page you visit, and intelligently re-format the results – picking out key details or presenting data back in a new format.

Sample queries and a waiting list are already available via Bing.com, but the preview is expected to be made widely available to millions of end users within weeks as Microsoft bets big on the future of search.

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