Artificial intelligence based on OpenAI technology has been integrated (for now only experimentally) in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, as well as in the new Business Chat tool.
Posted on 16 March 2023 by Redazione
The "copilot" of Microsoft artificial intelligence arrives in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, presenting itself as an ally for the productivity of those who, every day, work in front of a PC. Following its recent debut in Dynamics365, ChatGPT’s generative AI technology has also been integrated into major Microsoft365 applications (formerly called Office365), at the moment still not in publicly available versions but only for a small number of companies testers. In addition, the Copilot is also part of the latest stable version of the Edge browser, the number 111, just released.
It is impossible not to notice the urgency of Big Tech, and in particular Microsoft and Alphabet, in launching continuous innovations in artificial intelligence on the wave of recent progress (not only in terms of technological skills, but also ease of implementation) The European Parliament has a duty in this area. Even Google this week presented similar news for its cloud collaboration environment Google Workspace, and in particular for Gmail and Docs.
Back to Microsoft, Copilot on Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook brings together the power of large language models (Llm, deep learning algorithms trained to understand one or more languages) with company data and Microsoft 365 apps, "to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and level up skills". And all this, assures the company, respecting Microsoft’s existing commitments to the security and privacy of corporate data, as well as the principles and standards of responsible artificial intelligence (Training of language models, for example, was not done with data from Microsoft customer companies).
"Copilot is more than just an OpenAI ChatGPT integration into Microsoft 365," the company stressed. "It is a sophisticated processing engine that works behind the scenes to combine the power of the Llm with Microsoft 365 apps and business data in the Microsoft Graph, now accessible to everyone through natural language".
Within Word the "copilot" can write, correct and summarize texts but leaving the user in control of the whole creative process. In essence, it intervenes only if it is consulted. It can also give an opinion on the quality of a text. In PowerPoint, on the other hand, artificial intelligence can create presentations from a user request (written in natural language, of course) and even add relevant content from a previously created document.
In Excel, the Copilot allows you to analyze trends and create charts and data charts, while in Outlook it can speed up writing and managing inbox (it will take a few minutes to "dispose of mail" even in an inbox clogged with messages).
It was also announced the debut of Business Chat, a new tool that will save time to find useful information within the vast panorama of business data, scattered among the different apps of Microsoft 365. You can access it through Microsoft 365.com, via Bing (by login with Azure Active Directory credentials) or through Teams. It will be a sort of "personal secretary", very fast and efficient, able to respond to a request like "explain to my team how we updated the product strategy". In the above example, Business Chat will create a status update (visible to affected users) with meetings, emails, and chat conversations relevant to the request. We talk about the future because at the moment Business Chat is accessible in preview only to Microsoft Teams subscribers.
For Edge 111, the Copilot replaces the Detect tab and, as you navigate, displays some data about the websites you visit, such as the source of traffic and the type of content. It also analyzes web pages and suggests similar content, potentially interesting for the user.
Tags: microsoft, ai, word, PowerPoint, artificial intelligence