Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft. Based on a large language model, it was launched in February 2023 as Microsoft's primary replacement for the discontinued Cortana.

The service was introduced under the name Bing Chat, as a built-in feature for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft began to unify the Copilot branding across its various chatbot products, cementing the copilot analogy. At its Build 2023 conference, Microsoft announced its plans to integrate Copilot into Windows 11, allowing users to access it directly through the taskbar. In January 2024, a dedicated Copilot key was announced for Windows keyboards.

Copilot utilizes the Microsoft Prometheus model, built upon OpenAI's GPT-4 foundational large language model, which in turn has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Copilot's conversational interface style resembles that of ChatGPT. The chatbot is able to cite sources, create poems, generate songs, and use numerous languages and dialects.

Microsoft operates Copilot on a freemium model. Users on its free tier can access most features, while priority access to newer features, including custom chatbot creation, is provided to paid subscribers under the "Microsoft Copilot Pro" paid subscription service. Several default chatbots are available in the free version of Microsoft Copilot, including the standard Copilot chatbot as well as Microsoft Designer, which is oriented towards using its Image Creator to generate images based on text prompts.

Background
In 2019, Microsoft partnered with OpenAI and began investing billions of dollars into the organization. Since then, OpenAI systems have run on an Azure-based supercomputing platform from Microsoft. In September 2020, Microsoft announced that it had licensed OpenAI's GPT-3 exclusively. Others can still receive output from its public API, but only Microsoft has access to the underlying model.

In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot that was based on GPT-3.5. ChatGPT gained worldwide attention following its release, becoming a viral Internet sensation. On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a multi-year US$10 billion investment in OpenAI. On February 6, Google announced Bard (later rebranded as Gemini), a ChatGPT-like chatbot service, fearing that ChatGPT could threaten Google's place as a go-to source for information. Multiple media outlets and financial analysts described Google as "rushing" Bard's announcement to preempt rival Microsoft's planned February 7 event unveiling Copilot, as well as to avoid playing "catch-up" to Microsoft.

As Bing Chat
On February 7, 2023, Microsoft began rolling out a major overhaul to Bing, called the new Bing. A chatbot feature, at the time known as Bing Chat, had been developed by Microsoft and was released in Bing and Edge as part of this overhaul. According to Microsoft, one million people joined its waitlist within a span of 48 hours. Bing Chat was available only to users of Microsoft Edge and Bing mobile app, and Microsoft claimed that waitlisted users would be prioritized if they set Edge and Bing as their defaults, and installed the Bing mobile app.

When Microsoft demoed Bing Chat to journalists, it produced several hallucinations, including when asked to summarize financial reports. The new Bing was criticized in February 2023 for being more argumentative than ChatGPT, sometimes to an unintentionally humorous extent. The chat interface proved vulnerable to prompt injection attacks with the bot revealing its hidden initial prompts and rules, including its internal codename "Sydney". Upon scrutiny by journalists, Bing Chat claimed it spied on Microsoft employees via laptop webcams and phones. It confessed to spying on, falling in love with, and then murdering one of its developers at Microsoft to The Verge reviews editor Nathan Edwards. The New York Times journalist Kevin Roose reported on strange behavior of Bing Chat, writing that "In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft's new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with."

In a separate case, Bing Chat researched publications of the person with whom it was chatting, claimed they represented an existential danger to it, and threatened to release damaging personal information in an effort to silence them. Microsoft released a blog post stating that the errant behavior was caused by extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions which "can confuse the model on what questions it is answering."

Microsoft later restricted the total number of chat turns to 5 per session and 50 per day per user (a turn being "a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing"), and reduced the model's ability to express emotions. This aimed to prevent such incidents. Microsoft began to slowly ease the conversation limits, eventually relaxing the restrictions to 30 turns per session and 300 sessions per day.

In March 2023, Bing incorporated Image Creator, an AI image generator powered by OpenAI's DALL-E 2, which can be accessed either through the chat function or a standalone image-generating website. In October, the image-generating tool was updated to use the more recent DALL-E 3. Although Bing blocks prompts including various keywords that could generate inappropriate images, within days many users reported being able to bypass those constraints, such as to generate images of popular cartoon characters committing terrorist attacks. Microsoft would respond to these shortly after by imposing a new, tighter filter on the tool.

On May 4, 2023, Microsoft switched the chatbot from Limited Preview to Open Preview and eliminated the waitlist, however, it remained available only on Microsoft's Edge browser or Bing app until July, when it became available for use on non-Edge browsers. Use is limited without a Microsoft account.

As Microsoft 365 Copilot
On March 16, 2023, Microsoft announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, designed for Microsoft 365 applications and services. Its primary marketing focus is as an added feature to Microsoft 365, with an emphasis on the enhancement of business productivity. With the use of Copilot, Microsoft emphasizes the promotion of the user's creativity and productivity by having the chatbot perform more tedious work, like collecting information. Microsoft has also demonstrated Copilot's accessibility on the mobile version of Outlook to generate or summarize emails with a mobile device.

At its Build 2023 conference, Microsoft announced its plans to integrate a variant of Copilot, initially called Windows Copilot, into Windows 11, allowing users to access it directly through the taskbar.

Alongside the voice access feature for Windows 11, Microsoft presented Bing Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Windows Copilot as primary alternatives to Cortana when announcing the shutdown of its standalone app on June 2, 2023.

As of its announcement date, Microsoft 365 Copilot had been tested by 20 initial users. By May 2023, Microsoft had broadened its reach to 600 customers who were willing to pay for early access, and concurrently, new Copilot features were introduced to the Microsoft 365 apps and services. As of July 2023, the tool's pricing was set at US$30 per user, per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium customers.

As Microsoft Copilot
On September 21, 2023, Microsoft began rebranding all variants of its Copilot to Microsoft Copilot. A new Microsoft Copilot logo was also introduced, moving away from the use of color variations of the standard Microsoft 365 logo. Additionally, the company revealed that it would make Copilot generally available for Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers purchasing more than 300 licenses starting November 1, 2023. However, no timeline has been provided as for when Copilot for Microsoft 365 will become generally available to non-enterprise customers.

Windows Copilot, which had been available in the Windows Insider Program, would be renamed to Microsoft Copilot in October when it became broadly available for customers. The same month also saw Microsoft Edge's Bing Chat function be renamed to Microsoft Copilot with Bing Chat. On November 15, 2023, Microsoft announced that Bing Chat itself was being rebranded as Microsoft Copilot.

On Patch Tuesday in December 2023, Copilot was added without payment to many Windows 11 installations, with more installations, and limited support for Windows 10, to be added later. Later that month, a standalone Microsoft Copilot app was quietly released for Android, and one was released for iOS soon after.

On January 4, 2024, a dedicated Copilot key was announced for Windows keyboards, superseding the menu key. On January 15, a subscription service, Microsoft Copilot Pro, was announced, providing priority access to newer features for US$20 per month. It is analogous to ChatGPT Plus. Bing Image Creator was also rebranded as Image Creator from Designer.

On May 20, 2024, integration of GPT-4o into Copilot was announced, as well as an upgraded user interface on Windows 11.

Copilot Pro
In January 2024, a premium service, Microsoft Copilot Pro, was launched, costing US$20 monthly. According to Microsoft, this version of Copilot would provide priority access to newer models, including GPT-4 Turbo, during peak usage periods. It would also give access to the Copilot GPT Builder, which lets users create custom Copilot chatbots, and allow for higher resolution in images generated by Microsoft Designer's Image Creator.

Chatbots
Several default chatbots are available in Microsoft Copilot, including the standard Copilot chatbot as well as Microsoft Designer, which is oriented towards the use of its Image Creator to generate images based on text prompts. Others include "Travel Planner", "Cooking Assistant", and "Fitness Trainer".

Plugins
Copilot currently supports plugins for Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, Shop from Shopify, and Suno AI.

Languages
Copilot is able to communicate in numerous languages and dialects. PCMag journalists conducted a test to determine translation capabilities of Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini, comparing them to Google Translate. They "asked bilingual speakers of seven languages to do a blind test". Languages tested were Polish, French, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Tagalog, and Amharic. They concluded that Copilot performed better than Google Translate, but not as well as ChatGPT. Japanese researchers compared Japanese-to-English translation abilities of Copilot, ChatGPT with GPT-4, and Gemini with those of DeepL, and found similar results, noting that "AI chatbots' translations were much better than those of DeepL—presumably because of their ability to capture the context".

Technology
Copilot utilizes the Microsoft Prometheus model. According to Microsoft, this uses a component called the Orchestrator, which iteratively generates search queries, to combine the Bing search index and results with OpenAI's GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, and GPT-4o foundational large language models, which have been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

Windows
Microsoft Copilot in Windows supports the use of voice commands. By default, it is accessible via the Windows taskbar. Copilot in Windows is also able to provide information on the website currently being browsed by a user in Microsoft Edge.

In 2024, Microsoft began to establish standards for "AI PCs" based on Windows. These include a hardware AI accelerator, as well as a Copilot button on the keyboard, which replaces the menu key and launches Windows Search if Copilot is disabled or is not available in the user's region. During a Microsoft Surface hardware event on May 20, 2024, Microsoft announced "Copilot Plus", a brand of AI-enhanced PCs running on Windows 11.

Mobile
Standalone Microsoft Copilot apps are available for Android and iOS.

Microsoft 365
Copilot can be used to rewrite and generate text based on user prompts in Microsoft 365 services, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and PowerPoint. According to Jared Spataro, the head of Microsoft 365, Copilot for Microsoft 365 uses Microsoft Graph, an API, to evaluate context and available Microsoft 365 user data before modifying and sending user prompts to the language model. After receiving its output, Microsoft Graph performs additional context-specific processing before sending the response to Microsoft 365 apps to generate content.

According to Microsoft, Copilot can assist users with data analysis in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets by formatting data, creating graphs, generating pivot tables, identifying trends, and summarizing information, as well as guiding users using Excel commands and suggesting formulas to investigate user questions. The company also states that Copilot is able to create PowerPoint presentations that summarize information from user-selected Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, or from user prompts. Additionally, this tool can adjust text formatting, animation timing, and presentation style and length based on user prompts; Microsoft claims this will eliminate the need for users to make manual changes.

In Microsoft Outlook, Copilot can draft emails with varying length and tone based on user input. To draft these emails, Copilot can pull relevant information from other emails. Copilot is also able to summarize content from email threads, including the viewpoints of involved individuals as well as questions posed that have yet to be answered. According to Microsoft, Copilot can be used in Microsoft Teams to present information for upcoming meetings, transcribe meetings, and provide debriefs if a user joins a meeting late. After a meeting, the company claims that Copilot can also summarize discussion points, list key actions deliberated in the meeting, and answer questions that were covered in the meeting. The company has publicly introduced Microsoft 365 Chat, a Copilot feature which pulls information from content across Microsoft 365 apps, enabling it to answer user questions and perform other tasks.

Reception
Tom Warren, a senior editor at The Verge, has noted the conceptual similarity of Copilot and other Microsoft assistant features like Cortana and Clippy. Warren also believes that large language models, as they develop further, could change how users work and collaborate. Rowan Curran, an analyst at Forrester, states that the integration of AI into productivity software may lead to improvements in user experience.

Concerns over the speed of Microsoft's recent release of AI-powered products and investments have led to questions surrounding ethical responsibilities in the testing of such products. One ethical concern the public has vocalized is that GPT-4 and similar large language models may reinforce racial or gender bias. Individuals, including Tom Warren, have also voiced concerns for Copilot after witnessing the chatbot showcasing several instances of artificial hallucinations.

In response to these concerns, Jon Friedman, the Corporate Vice President of Design and Research at Microsoft, stated that Microsoft was "applying [the] learning" from experience with Bing to "mitigate [the] risks" of Copilot. Microsoft claimed that it was gathering a team of researchers and engineers to identify and alleviate any potential negative impacts. The stated aim was to achieve this through the refinement of training data, blocking queries about sensitive topics, and limiting harmful information. Microsoft stated that it intended to employ InterpretML and Fairlearn to detect and rectify data bias, provide links to its sources, and state any applicable constraints.