Microsoft bills its Copilot generative AI service as “your everyday AI companion.” That sounds nice, but what the heck does it mean?
Copilot is a conversational chat interface that lets you search for specific information, generate text such as emails and summaries, and create images based on text prompts you write. For example, if you type in, “Summarize this memo in two sentences,” Copilot will do just that by giving you a concise written summary in the chat interface below your request. Ditto for images. The AI can create images based on your text prompt (using OpenAI’s Dall-E). You can even ask Copilot to write code in many popular computer languages, including C, JavaScript, and Python.
It’s important to understand that Copilot is still changing and developing fast—in how it works, what it can do, and what it is. Until late 2023, for example, Microsoft had something called Bing Chat, which overlapped with Copilot, but now it’s all just called Copilot. Even the components and design of Copilot keep changing. The appearance of the Copilot web page has changed significantly, too.
The back-end technology and interfaces continuously evolve, too, though the basics are in place. The new Copilot+ PCs can perform some AI processing locally on those computers’ NPUs, but most Copilot processing still happens via Microsoft’s cloud. Confusingly, the Copilot+ AI features are a separate set of capabilities from the standard Copilot service I discuss here.
How Do You Get Copilot and What Can It Do?
You can use Microsoft Copilot in several places I list below. In all of these scenarios, Copilot can answer questions and generate text and images. You can interact with a choice of human-like AI voices or with a keyboard.
Copilot Website
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
The Copilot website, copilot.microsoft.com, is available via any web browser on any device. You get the interface you see in most places where you can access the AI. Click the microphone, and a lifelike voice greets you. If you type, you see your answers in text in the window. You can speak as though you’re engaging in a normal conversation and even interrupt Copilot. Clicking the Copilot icon shows your Copilot Daily, a custom-generated podcast, along with suggested topics you can dig into.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Copilot in Windows
Copilot in Windows is now nearly identical to the web version. It’s a progressive web app (PWA), but its differentiator is that it has an (optional) Taskbar button, and its window lacks the browser border. New PCs now come with a Copilot key on their keyboards for summoning this app. If you open it, you get a tray icon for it in the system tray. A native XAML app with an updated interface is in the works.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
The redesigned Copilot in Windows no longer lets you change Windows settings or open apps like the previous version. But truth be told, that functionality was clunky and not very useful, requiring more clicks than just opening an app via the Start menu or a shortcut. The Windows Copilot app is basically a standalone AI chat box at this point. But you do get a choice between a Day and Night mode.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
You also get the Copilot Daily personal news and information podcast and chat suggestions like in the web version. You can upload a file, such as an image or document, and ask Copilot to describe or summarize it and ask questions about its content. A screenshot tool offers another way to discuss an image with the AI.
Copilot Mobile Apps for Android and iOS
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
You can install the Copilot app on both Android and iOS devices. By now, the interface should come as no surprise (it’s the same as on the web and desktop apps). The app is identical on both mobile platforms. (Note that the screenshot on the right is of an Android tablet, hence the wider aspect ratio.)
Copilot in Bing Search and the Bing Mobile App
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Bing was the first Microsoft product to receive the generative AI treatment, originally dubbed Bing Chat. You can still benefit from Copilot smarts within the company’s search site. A button at the top of the interface opens the same web Copilot from above, but you also see Copilot-generated answers at the top of a search result page. These are similar to Google’s AI Overviews, which came later. Here’s an example:
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Copilot Sidebar in the Edge Web Browser
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Edge’s sidebar includes a Copilot icon in the top-right corner of the browser window. One difference in this format of Copilot is that you can ask it things about the currently active webpage—handy for things like summarizing long-winded pages. On Copilot+ PCs, you can enable Copilot Vision, which adds a toolbar at the bottom of the window. A screen-sharing icon in this toolbar lets Copilot Vision “see” your web page and its images. It can then provide descriptions and background info on said images.
Copilot in Microsoft 365
As a testament to how committed Microsoft is to Copilot, the company recently renamed the Office 365 app for desktop and mobile to Microsoft 365 Copilot and changed the productivity suite’s logo to include the Copilot logo. With a paid M365 subscription, you can use Copilot directly in Microsoft 365 apps, like Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Teams (Copilot for Teams requires a business subscription). Businesses that install Microsoft 365 can ground Copilot’s responses with their own data. In other words, you can ask Copilot about specific information in your company’s Microsoft Team chats, Outlook emails, or Word documents. Businesses can even build custom Copilots to address specific needs. Enterprise pricing varies.
Any personal user with an up-to-date M365 account can brush up on language in Word docs, generate PowerPoint slideshows from text descriptions, suggest appropriate formulas in Excel, or summarize email threads in Outlook. Well, that is, anyone who didn’t choose to downgrade to Office without Copilot. Previously, you had to pay an additional $20 per month for a Copilot Pro subscription to get these helpers, but now it’s just an additional $3 per month for M365 subscribers.
Copilot in Messaging Apps
(Credit: Telegram/Meta/Microsoft/PCMag)
A final way that you can interact with Microsoft’s AI is via the Telegram and Whatsapp chat apps. In this form, Copilot is like any other contact that you chat with. You can find it simply through the app’s contact search or go to this Copilot support page, where there’s a QR code to help you get started easily. Alternatively, you can simply add the chatbot’s phone number (+1 877-224-1042) to the app’s contacts section. Copilot can impressively generate images inside these apps.
How Much Does Copilot Cost?
Copilot is free to use on the web, in Windows, in the Edge browser, and via the mobile Copilot apps. In addition to the free version of Copilot, there are at least five paid tiers of service.
For individuals and small businesses, Copilot Pro costs $20 per month. You get one month free to kick the tires. Pro gives you faster results using the most up-to-date AI models.
Business and Enterprise Microsoft 365 customers can get Copilot for Microsoft 365 ($30 per person per month), which lets them use Copilot to get answers and suggestions based on company data. On top of writing and summarizing text based on your team’s information, Copilot can generate visual branding for your organization. This more expensive version of Copilot keeps interactions private to the organization and doesn’t use your input to train the versions of Copilot that other people use.
Two more paid versions of Copilot are Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service. The former lets you generate sales meeting briefs and emails and also integrates CRM data. The latter helps contact centers make customer engagements more engaging by tapping company and customer data.
Copilot Studio is for advanced organizations that want to build custom versions of Copilot that incorporate custom data to deliver predictable responses within conversations. It starts at $200 per month.
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Copilot is available in 60 countries with local language support for each.
What Technology Is Behind Copilot?
Copilot uses Microsoft’s Prometheus AI model, which takes advantage of generative AI tools from OpenAI, namely ChatGPT-4, ChatGPT-4o, and DALL-E 3. If you were to use some of those tools in ChatGPT itself, you have to pay for a ChatGPT Plus subscription ($20 per month). With Copilot, you get them for free. In addition to using the OpenAI models, Prometheus also relies on the large web-scraping database from the Bing search engine, Microsoft Natural Language Processing, Text to Speech (TTS) for generating lifelike speech responses, Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) to ground and add context, and Azure cloud services. Copilot’s Think Deeper option (now free for all) uses OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model for prompts that require more in-depth figuring, such as math problems or planning complex scenarios.
What Makes Copilot Different From Other Generative AI Chatbots?
Generative AI chatbots are converging on features. When I first wrote this article, Copilot was the only one among ChatGPT and Google Gemini with voice input capability. Ditto for uploading images for the AI to comment on. The others have caught up at this point. However, Copilot still has some unique aspects. For example, Gemini doesn’t offer conversational voice interactions like ChatGPT and Copilot. Copilot’s functionality inside the Office applications and the Edge web browser is also a differentiator since ChatGPT doesn’t have anything similar. Gemini has similar AI tools in Google Docs, but Chrome doesn’t include equivalent Gemini features.
Privacy and Copyright Issues With Copilot
Just like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, Copilot uses anonymized conversations to train its AI model. That means it uses whatever you type into it to train itself by default. However, you can turn off that behavior if you sign in. To do so, click on your name in the top right and then on the Privacy section.
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)
Microsoft documents its approach to responsible AI in Copilot, as well as a Responsible AI Standard and AI Principles for all its services. According to Microsoft, these policies promote accountability, transparency, fairness, reliability, safety, privacy, security, and inclusiveness. A response form lets anyone give feedback about issues with responsible AI. The policy requires Microsoft to “conduct impact assessments, evaluations, and ongoing monitoring for AI systems to identify and mitigate potential risks and harms to people, organizations, and society.”
Microsoft has a Copilot Copyright Commitment policy that covers paying customers, representing them in copyright infringement cases, and paying resulting fines. Free users of Copilot don’t have the same protections and must review, adapt, and attribute generated content they use publicly. Work and school accounts also benefit from Commercial Data Protection, which states that Microsoft won’t use customer data to train the AI and doesn’t have access to Copilot interactions.
Copilot Is a Moving Target, and It’s Not Perfect
The generative AI technology behind Copilot is based on machine learning, recursive neural networks, large language models, and large image data sets. The version of ChatGPT on which Copilot is based (GPT-4o) uses a trillion parameters when formulating answers. It’s a quickly evolving field, and Microsoft is reportedly preparing for the upcoming 4.5 and 5.0 models. The AI models behind Copilot continue to improve how they understand and parse what you’re asking and sift through data to generate relevant results faster.
Copilot represents remarkable advances in artificial intelligence. Being able to generate prose, poetry, images, lists, charts, itineraries, recipes, and answers to obscure questions without requiring lots of search term tweaking is a boon. But Copilot takes longer to produce results than a good old web search, and its facts aren’t always correct (though it provides links to sources and corrects itself in response to your feedback). Copilot itself comes with a warning: “Microsoft Copilot uses AI to respond, so mistakes are possible.”
That’s par for the course in the rapidly developing field of generative AI, and it’s quite possible that Copilot has already changed significantly since we published this story. I’ll be tracking its progress and updating this article accordingly, so be sure to check back for our latest findings.
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About Michael Muchmore
Lead Software Analyst
