Microsoft expands AI assistant Copilot with new collaboration features

As Microsoft explains in a press release, the company has already made hundreds of updates to its AI-based assistance feature, which will be released in 2023. The new feature is “Copilot Pages,” a platform on which users can edit AI-generated content together and share it with other people.

Copilot Pages integrates the Copilot chatbot into a workspace where users can collaboratively edit and refine AI-generated content. The platform makes it possible to convert temporary AI results into permanent content that can be edited and shared with team members.

Copilot Pages lets users bring together web data, work data, and business data and permanently store AI-generated results. The platform will initially be available to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers and will later be made available to the general public in September 2024.

Microsoft also says that Copilot now uses the GPT-4o language model, which has led to a “significant improvement” in performance. Answers are said to be available about twice as quickly as before, and a user survey has shown a significant increase in the quality of answers.

In addition to Copilot Pages, new features for individual apps in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem were also announced:

• Excel: Copilot can now include non-tabular formatted data and supports Python integration for advanced analytics
• PowerPoint: The “Narrative Builder” enables the rapid creation of presentation drafts in collaboration with Copilot.
• Teams: Copilot can analyze meetings and give users a “complete picture” of the meeting, including unanswered questions.
• Outlook: The Prioritize My Inbox feature helps intelligently sort emails based on content and company context.
• Word: Copilot enables the integration of information from different sources to create initial document drafts.
• OneDrive: Copilot allows users to quickly navigate through all existing files to find and compare the information they need.