What is Microsoft Copilot and how to use Bing AI chatbot
Microsoft Copilot, also known as Bing Chat, is a generative AI assistant from Microsoft that can solve many tasks. Here’s what Microsoft’s generative products can do and how to use them.
What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot is an artificial intelligence chatbot integrated into most Microsoft services. Conversational artificial intelligence can answer questions, provide content, create images, and perform a wide range of tasks and requests.
What sets Microsoft Copilot apart from other AI assistants like ChatGPT is that it’s integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem, so you can use it across the board on platforms like Teams, Outlook, and Office, as well as the Bing search engine.
These systems also differ in pricing. The Copilot chatbot is available through the Bing search engine and the Windows operating system free of charge for users. However, to access Copilot through other services (Teams, Outlook, and Office), you’ll have to pay.
Microsoft Copilot is an add-on for Microsoft 365 Enterprise that costs $30 per month. The add-on is available only with the Microsoft 365 E3 enterprise suite, which costs $36 per month, and the Microsoft 365 E5 plan, which costs $57 per month. That is, the minimum cost of access to all Microsoft Copilot features is $66 per month.
How do I access Copilot in Bing?
Copilot in Bing can be accessed from the Bing homepage. It’s also available as a built-in feature in the Microsoft Edge web browser. Just click on the Chat button in the top menu. Copilot has three conversation modes.
1. Creative mode
For original and creative results. This style of conversation is likely to lead to longer, more detailed responses that may include jokes, stories, poems, or images. In Creative mode, you can also call Copilot in Bing’s built-in image editor and generate images on demand.
2. Precision mode
Use this conversation style in Bing’s Copilot when you need factual and concise answers. Copilot in Bing will use shorter, simpler sentences without unnecessary details or embellishments.
3. 3. Balanced mode
Use the Balanced conversation style in Copilot in Bing if you need a balance between creativity and accuracy.
Does Copilot save chat history in Bing?
By default, regardless of your browser or operating system, every search query and every website is saved as part of your personal browsing history. This rule also applies to Copilot in Bing.
You can delete your personal browsing history at any time and change certain settings to reduce the amount of data stored in your history.
In addition, Microsoft collects data on Bing and Copilot search results to help its artificial intelligence platform perform better and more accurately. This data is collected together and anonymized.
What tasks can be performed with Copilot and how does it differ from ChatGPT?
In the free version, you can ask questions to the chatbot and get detailed answers, as if it were a human speaking, with notes that refer to the original sources, and it can also help you write code, poems, or blog ideas, i.e. it works similarly to ChatGPT. This is not surprising, since it uses the GPT-4 language model.
However, there are a few differences. Since the chatbot is connected to the Internet, it has the ability to provide you with up-to-date information, which is another feature that the free version of ChatGPT cannot boast of.
On December 5, Microsoft announced that Copilot will receive several new features, including a new GPT-4 Turbo model, improved multimodal search, and a code interpreter.
In January 2024, Microsoft launched the premium service Microsoft Copilot Pro, which costs $20. According to Microsoft, this version of Copilot will provide priority access to new models, including the GPT-4 Turbo. It will also provide access to the Copilot GPT Builder, which allows users to create their own Copilot chatbots, and will also provide higher resolution images generated by Microsoft Designer Image Creator.
GPT-4 Turbo also features a 128 KB context window that allows you to fit more than 300 pages of text in a single request. It also has the ability to process PDFs and other external documents.
What features are available in the paid version of Copilot
The paid version of Copilot provides a number of advantages in Microsot: Teams, Outlook, Office, etc.
For example, in Teams, you can create custom update requests for group chats or projects: summarize the results of a meeting or select the highlights of the last seven days.
In Outlook, the Copilot tool can help you automatically write emails in a specific style or analyze your incoming mail.
The tool can also be used in Microsoft Office applications: in Word to optimize text processing, and in Excel to reorganize or search for key data.