The launch of Copilot Pro by Microsoft should mark a turning point in the adoption of generative AI for professionals. Until now, everyone has been able to experience the potential of ChatGPT, Gemini and others through their freely accessible chatbots.
Microsoft’s proposal is of another order. By integrating AI natively into its collaboration suite, subscribers to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family can now have an intelligent assistant to support them in their daily tasks, whether it is writing an email or refining a presentation. .
Little hesitation before taking out your bank card. The cost of the Copilot Pro subscription – 22 euros per month – may, in fact, seem dissuasive if we compare it to the price-quality ratio of Microsoft 365 Family.
Activation of the service is a bit disappointing
For 99 euros per year, up to six users have access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote as well as a storage capacity of 1 TB per person (OneDrive).
Activating the service is a bit disappointing. No magic wand making your work environment suddenly “intelligent”. The new Copilot Pro subscriber is simply sent to the online chatbot. No noticeable change at first glance except access to GPT-4 Turbo, the most efficient OpenAI model to date.
There is also no tutorial to guide the user. It’s up to him to grope around to understand the extent of the offer. Access to DALL-E 3, the image generator of the same OpenAI, is thus done from Microsoft’s “Image Creator” from another URL. You still need to know. The integration into the collaborative suite is revealed little by little through restarts and reconnections to the service.
Drafts on the fly in Word
A Copilot button appears as if by magic in the left margin of Word. No more blank page syndrome, the virtual assistant offers to write a draft of a text from a prompt of maximum 2,000 characters including spaces.
In this case, we asked him to write an article about the features of Copilot Pro in Word. The result can be kept as is or refined by challenging the tool or asking it to adopt a different writing style.
With the “inspire me” function, Copilot Pro this time completes a draft of text by generating the following paragraphs. It is also possible to select one or more paragraphs and ask the AI to rewrite them using a neutral, professional, informal, imaginative or concise tone.
During various tests, the quality of the text produced made it usable. From a thumbs down or up, it is possible to report an incorrect result. Note that these assisted writing functions are however found in AI content generation tools such as Writesonic or Jasper.
A real time saver in processing emails
In Outlook, using Copilot Pro saves valuable time. The virtual agent aims to summarize incoming emails in the form of key points. A particularly interesting feature for summarizing a newsletter or a long exchange between several interlocutors. The content of the messages is well reproduced despite some approximations.
Like Gmail, Copilot Pro also offers the ability to respond to emails by generating automatic responses. The “coach” function evaluates the quality of your draft before sending it and recommends some advice concerning, for example, the formalism to adopt. Useful for correcting possible gross mistakes. Useless when the AI offers turns of phrase that are too polite or even obsequious.
One function will be particularly useful when it is well adjusted: the suggestion of time slots in order to schedule an interview between two correspondents.
Unfortunately, the test was inconclusive. Copilot Pro offered my interlocutor time slots on weekends but also during the week on times where appointments were already planned. Damage. However, it is obvious that in the near future personal AIs will synchronize our respective agendas.
When AI automatically generates a presentation…
In Power point, Copilot Pro thinks big since it offers nothing less than creating a presentation from scratch from a prompt of the same length as in Word. In a few seconds, the AI designs a series of slides whose text and layout can be modified from Designer. It can also generate content from existing slides or reorganize an existing presentation.
The result is stunning for generic requests. To avoid any risk of litigation in terms of intellectual property, the tool offers symbolic visuals. For a presentation on the best Robert de Niro films, we will therefore not find any photos of the American actor or posters for The Godfather, Raging Bull or Goodfellas.
The benefit of generative AI in OneNote seems less obvious
The benefit of generative AI in OneNote seems less obvious. Among the suggested “prompts”, Copilot Pro typically offers to summarize a note, rewrite it, establish a plan, write a task list or list the advantages and disadvantages of a project.
The contextual elements contained in the notes are not always taken into consideration.
Copilot Pro in Excel; it’s not that yet
The most frustrating experience remains using Copilot Pro in Excel.
We can very well imagine in a few months or a few years the possibilities of generative AI in the field of data analysis. For the moment, Copilot Pro is only available in preview and in English. The wizard only works on calculation files.
On paper, Copilot Pro in Excel should be able to highlight certain key data, help create complex formulas or automatically generate graphs.
The tests were inconclusive. Various files offered as open data were not supported or the tool was buggy during generation. We will obviously have to wait some time to work on a more complete version.