Microsoft is undergoing a rebranding effort for Bing Chat, now named “Copilot,” unifying its generative AI assistant identity across products. The enterprise version, Bing Chat Enterprise, will also adopt the Copilot name and become generally available from December 1. While it remains free for specific Microsoft 365 licenses, including F3 accounts for frontline workers, a standalone subscription priced at $5 per month will be introduced.
Copilot is powered by OpenAI’s latest models, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, emphasizing a privacy-centric approach. Microsoft assures that it will not retain prompts and responses, ensuring that interactions within Copilot are not visible to the company. Moreover, customer chats will not contribute to the training of the underlying models.
Alongside the rebranding, Microsoft unveiled additional personalization options for Copilot in Microsoft 365. Users can customize formatting, style, and tone, initially in Word and PowerPoint, with plans to extend these options to other applications later on.
In Teams, Copilot will gain the ability to take notes during meetings, allowing users to guide the assistant on specific information to include, such as quoting a co-worker’s remarks. Copilot will assist in meetings on the fly without enabling transcription, list and visualize Teams discussions in Whiteboard, and synthesize long posts or review daily highlights in Teams channels.
In Outlook, Copilot will analyze invitation details, related emails, and relevant documents to create a summary of events, available for quick review in spring next year. A forthcoming feature in Word will enable users to easily identify the latest document changes by asking Copilot questions like “How do I see what has changed in this document?” In PowerPoint, users can leverage corporate brand assets and reimagine them using AI-generated visuals.
These developments were part of Microsoft’s announcements at the Ignite AI event, which also included the introduction of two in-house AI chips, the Azure Maia AI Accelerator and Azure Cobalt CPU.
